“Sometimes,” said Sheila Malone, 60, a retired nurse living in Waterville, Maine, “we overlook the fact that there are all kinds of people out there who would like to do something, if there was a way for them to do it.”
Malone was discussing the People’s Weekly World’s new “Worldbuilder” program, in which supporters donate a minimum of $10 per month, either by check or automatic credit card deduction. In exchange, they receive an unlimited subscription to the PWW.
“This allows anybody on any income to actually be able to do something,” she added.
Malone, who lives on a fixed income, said that she had been wishing for an easy way to donate a sizable amount to the PWW.
“The automatic deduction is extremely helpful for me! It’s a small but very steady payment every month,” which adds up to a lot, she said. “Then I don’t have to come up with a larger amount on a yearly basis.”
“When you’re on a fixed income,” Malone continued, “it helps to be able to look at your income every month and know what’s going to which different places at the beginning of the month.”
“I feel really good about this.”
Malone worked for decades as a nurse on the West Coast. She had to retire because the polio that she had as a child caused her problems later in life. She then moved to Maine, where her grandchildren live.
“One of the things that frustrated me most,” she said, “was that I saw the decline of the health care system, and nobody else was speaking out during my years in nursing. Nobody else was doing anything to stop it.”
Malone finds this paper’s reporting on the labor movement particularly important.
“I feel that most people in this country today have no education on the labor movement and the importance of the labor movement to the job they hold today, to their own lives,” she said. “No history is being taught in the educational system, and what is being taught is not only very poor, but is most of the time dead wrong.”
Unlike other newspapers, the PWW in every issue devotes one or two pages to the labor movement, and follows campaigns launched by the AFL-CIO and Change to Win, as well as local, grassroots labor initiatives.
Asked whether there was any area in which the PWW should improve, Malone said no. However, after a moment of thought, she replied that she wants it to get to more people, and to be in “every library in the country.”
“I’d like to see it go back to a daily!”
For more information on the Worldbuilder program, call (646) 437-5363 or e-mail dmargolis @ pww.org., or write to Worldbuilders c/o PWW, 235 West 23rd Street, New York, NY 10011.
Comments