My name is Beau Revlett, SURJ’s Appalachia People’s Union Director, and I want to tell you a story about Heather, one of our grassroots leaders in Boyd County, Kentucky. If you feel moved by this story, I invite you to contribute to this work, so we can keep organizing with Heather and many others like her.
Heather is a single mom living in rural Eastern Kentucky. We first met Heather because one of our Kentucky People’s Union (KPU) members knocked on her apartment door to talk with her about our campaign for tenant protections. Heather had been trying to get her landlord to make repairs for months, but he mostly ignored her, so when we told her about our campaign, she attended the next meeting.
Before long, Heather, alongside other KPU members, was giving public comments at city council meetings and inviting others to join our group. Day by day, our numbers and power grew, our strategy became sharper, until we won our first campaign to get city commissioners to improve tenant protections in the city.
But not long after we won our campaign, the landlords organized themselves and pressured the city commissioners to roll back some of our wins. So, our leaders, Heather, and other members, got together to figure out what to do.
KPU could have quit. They could have said, “Landlords have more power than us, they have the money, so let’s stop trying.” But they didn’t do that. Instead, KPU decided to run one of our members for city commission to fight back.
In 2024 – a year when Boyd County went 38 percentage points to Trump – our KPU candidate came within just 150 votes of getting through the primary.
During the campaign, Heather spent hours phone banking, knocking on doors, and hosting house meetings. That work and the conversations with her neighbors were transformative for her – so inspiring, in fact, that now Heather is going to run for Ashland City Commission in 2026 to keep fighting for tenants’ rights.
This is the power of organizing.
This is the kind of work that SURJ aims to be doing all across the South. Right now, we are focused on organizing in Northeastern Kentucky, one of the poorest and whitest regions in the United States, but we believe that we can build this all across the rural South. Will you contribute today to make it possible for SURJ to expand our work in Kentucky?
As W.E.B. Du Bois once said, “So goes the South, so goes the nation.” We see Trump and the authoritarians building a new coalition on the Right and how they are vying for working-class white people, but if we out-organize them by winning the hearts and minds of those southerners first, we’ll build the multiracial working-class coalition that will defeat them. Will you be part of that vital work by donating today?
In solidarity,
Beau
Showing Up for Racial Justice
PO Box 1376
Buffalo, NY 14205
United States