We’re pleased to welcome Rev Joe Paperone as a guest speaker this week. Rev Joe will speak as a member of the New York State Poor Peoples’ Campaign, basing his message on this quote from Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.:

The dispossessed of this nation – the poor, both white and Negro – live in a cruelly unjust society. They must organize a revolution against the injustice, not against the lives of the persons who are their fellow citizens, but against the structures through which the society is refusing to take means which have been called for, and which are at hand, to lift the load of poverty. The only real revolutionary, people say, is a man who has nothing to lose.

There are millions of poor people in this country who have very little, or even nothing, to lose. If they can be helped to take action together, they will do so with a freedom and a power that will be a new and unsettling force in our complacent national life.”

Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. – Nonviolence and Social Change, 1967

Rev. Joe Paparone is the community organizer with the Rotterdam Community Center, and a member of the Nonviolent Medicaid Army, National Union of the Homeless, and New York State Poor People’s Campaign. These all share a common analysis and seek to carry forward Dr. King’s work by organizing poor and dispossessed people to confront the interlocking injustices of systemic racism, poverty, militarism, ecological devastation, and the distorted moral narrative of White Christian Nationalism.

Joe is a lifelong New Yorker, growing up in the Mid-Hudson Valley, near New Paltz. He earned a Bachelor of Science in Music Education from the College of Saint Rose in 2004 and a Master of Arts in Global Leadership from Fuller Theological Seminary in 2012. He is a licensed minister with the Mennonite Church USA.

Joe lives in Albany with his wife Lesley and their dogs, Artax and Nym. He plays saxophone in the Victory Soul Orchestra and The Abyssmals, and in his free time he enjoys finding vegetarian restaurants and exploring the Adirondacks via foot, bike or canoe.