**UPDATE FOR THE END OF JUNE**
At the end of June, comrades have taken 1,698,630 steps towards Cuba, clocking up 850 miles – roughly the distance between Nottingham and Madrid! Huge thanks once again to all those who have supported us with sponsorships and donations – and to those who are adding their steps to the tally!
Nottingham supporters have raised over £1,900 towards our target of £3500. If you haven’t yet sponsored us, please donate via https://www.paypal.me/NottmRCG, and if you’d like to join in and add your own steps to our total, email [email protected]
**UPDATE FOR THE END OF APRIL**
By the end of April our comrades had walked and run 365,655 steps, amounting to more than 182 miles, taking us across England and Wales and over the Irish Sea, just short of Dublin! Many thanks to all those who have already sponsored us or donated to the fund drive in other ways – so far Nottingham supporters have raised £955 toward our target of £3,500. If you haven’t sponsored us already, please donate via https://www.paypal.me/NottmRCG, and if you’d like to join in and add your steps to our total email [email protected].
We are supporters of the Revolutionary Communist Group (RCG) in Nottingham, England, and we need your help to support our educational and campaign work. Since our branch was set up in 2015, we have been active on the streets and in communities, fighting for decent housing, welfare and employment, resisting state racism in the form of deportations and immigration prisons, opposing imperialist aggression against the people of Syria, Iran, Kurdistan and Palestine, and defending revolutionary struggles in Venezuela, Bolivia and socialist Cuba. We have run dozens of open public meetings and educational programmes, involving hundreds of people, and have played a major role in building wider campaigns, including Nottingham Youth Strike for Climate and Nottingham Housing Justice Forum.
The Covid-19 pandemic and lockdown pose serious problems for how we conduct and fund our work, and it is vital that the RCG survives so that we are able to contribute to the struggles the working class will face in the coming period.
To support our work under these difficult conditions, we are organising a sponsored ‘Steps Toward Socialism’ fundraiser. Over the coming months our supporters will contribute their daily steps, within their homes and when going out to exercise, toward a symbolic goal of the 9 million steps (4,595 miles) from Nottingham to Socialist Cuba. We will post regular updates here on our progress.
Our organisation has decades of experience of grassroots organising but these are unprecedented times and we need to learn as we go and rapidly develop new strategies. All of our work in Nottingham is done on a voluntary basis, but relies on an office, campaigning materials, travel expenses, computers, software and phones. Ordinarily, this is funded by subscriptions from our supporters and donations from individuals we meet on the streets and in communities. We have no wealthy backers and our newspaper carries no advertising. Now we are having to significantly extend our online reach, which incurs additional costs, while also maintaining our physical organisational infrastructure.
All of the funds raised through this campaign will be used to help meet the costs incurred in our work, including office rent, production costs for our national newspaper, ‘Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism!’ and our website at www.revolutionarycommunist.org, online educational activities and online public events, and new publications and campaigning materials (sound systems, leaflets, banners) to put us in a strong position once the lockdown ends to get back out on the streets, defending the working class and organising for socialism.
Why is this important, and why now?
As the Covid-19 pandemic sweeps across the world, it is more important than ever to build a socialist movement. In Britain, the Conservative government has put business first, failing to take any of the urgent measures needed to protect human lives – whether testing on a mass scale, providing all front-line staff with personal protective equipment, expanding ventilators to meet the expected surge in demand, or giving working-class people the economic security they need to self-isolate. Already, food banks are struggling to meet increased demand. The government has seized the opportunity to undermine civil liberties and democratic rights, in preparation for the inevitable upsurge of working-class anger at the government’s total failure to adequately confront this health crisis. The Labour Party is meekly going along with this and has just elected an even more right-wing leadership.
Socialist Cuba shows that an alternative is possible. The Cuban healthcare system seeks prevention over cure, with a network of family doctors who are responsible for community health and live among their patients. To combat the outbreak, healthcare personnel are conducting door-to-door health checks, testing, contact tracing, quarantining, establishing a registry of those with underlying health conditions, alongside a public health campaign and daily updates. Cuba has sent healthcare professionals to 37 countries to assist in combating the pandemic, continuing the revolution’s proud history of medical internationalism. Cuba provides a beacon to the world, showing that where the working class takes power it is possible to build a society that protects human life – we need to learn from that example to fight for socialism in Britain.
How you can help:
- Sponsor our steps by donating at https://www.paypal.me/NottmRCG, no donation is too small or too large;
- Join in the ‘Steps Toward Socialism’ fundraiser by recording your steps (this can be done using a free app on most modern smart phones), sending weekly updates on your total to [email protected] and asking your friends and family to sponsor you via this page. You could do a run or walk or just record your steps around the house; we’ll include your steps in the updates on the total that will be reported on this page;
- Share this page on social media and encourage others to donate;
- Contact us [email protected] to find out other ways you can contribute to our work;
