Dear Volunteer

Greetings to you for the New Year. It will be a good year – a year of success for our Congress of the People – if we get down to work without delay.

By decision of the National Council, the Congress of the People will definitely be called before June of this year. There is a great deal to do before you can say “Now we are ready; the people are ready; our Congress of the People will be a tremendous success. “

What are the things we need to do?

First: We must collect in the demands of the people for inclusion in the Freedom Charter. This work must start now; by 30th [sic] of February, 1955, we must have received the claims and demands of the people, so that the work of assembling all these demands into a single Charter can go ahead.

What is the Freedom Charter?

The Freedom Charter will be the Charter of the demands of all the South African people for the things that they want to make their lives happy and free. It will be a document to guide all our future work, but it will be written by the ordinary people themselves, through the demands that they themselves send in. It is hoped that thousands and thousands of gatherings, some small, some large, will be held where people can speak freely of their own lives, what changes they want in their way of life, in the laws they live under and in the conditions. Look at the – “Call” – in it are the kinds of things that people will talk about – the land, wages, taxes, education, health, recreation, laws, food and peace. From these meetings, no matter how small they are, will come the demands of the people for the changes they want. All these demands, no matter how trifling, no matter how local they may be – ALL those demands of the people must be noted on, recorded and sent in for inclusion in the Freedom Charter. And they must be in by not later than the 28th February, 1955. When all these demands are received, they will be put together, carefully, to make a single Charter which will truly be the voice of the people of this country.