About Us
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The Power of the People
For 40 years, The George Wiley Center has been a grassroots agency that organizes members of the low-income community to advocate for systematic changes aimed at alleviating problems associated with poverty.
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The work of the George Wiley Center is based on the belief that each person in our community is endowed with innate dignity and worth. Each deserves a decent home, adequate clothing and nutritious food, the essential resources for intellectual and emotional development. These goals are achieved through community education and awareness and community organization and development.
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We are committed to forming cooperative alliances with church, business, labor and community groups and to bringing those directly impacted by poverty into leadership roles as community change agents. Our agency holds open (free & public) membership meetings in numerous locations around Rhode Island.
"If there is a genius in organizing, it is the capacity to sense what is possible for people to do under given conditions, and to help them do it...Simply put, people cannot defy institutions to which they have no access and to which they make no contribution."
From Poor People's Movements: Why they succeed, How they Fail, by Frances Fox Piven and Richard A Cloward