The Unhoused Solidarity Working Group exists to serve the people – to build relationships with, and organize alongside, unhoused people. Our goal is to build an organized and lasting political formation that deals with issues of housing insecurity and its root causes.
Our main project is the Kennedy Plaza Cop Watch project. The Unhoused Solidarity Working Group and its KP Cop Watch project grew out of our individual participation at RIHAP (Rhode Island Homeless Advocacy Project) and the desire we saw there for a cop watch. There was a lack of capacity within RIHAP at that time, so the PGA alongside members of Food Not Bombs and Feed the People proposed and create the Unhoused Solidary group in the Spring of 2025.
Our goal with Unhoused Solidarity WG and KP Cop Watch is to challenge the political and economic systems that produce homelessness (like unaffordable and unavailable housing, substandard health care, shelters with conditions worse than the street), and the institution of the police which has always been designed to control and brutalized people of color and the poor. We are not here to “make the police do their job better.” It is our belief that they are doing what they have always been designed to do. We see our role as one of helping to protect people from mistreatment and to challenge the systems that create that mistreatment. Antifascism means abolition.
Our goal is to abolish the systems that create homelessness, and the institutions (like police) that protect those systems. You may not fully share this orientation, and that’s alright. But that is where we are coming from.
World Cup Cop Watch – may & june 2026
Providence will be bringing over 400,000 World Cup tourists in June and the Providence Police plan to sweep unhoused people out of downtown. In response, KP Cop Watch is doing a cop watch blitz to document and deter police harassment. We are aiming to have cop watchers out in downtown every day starting May 24th leading up to June 11th (and hopefully beyond…).
For more information, come to the General Assembly or contact us at kennedyplazapop @ proton.me