Subject: Organizing
We have a review up by Ted Wysocki of Gale Force, the biography of Gale Cincotta. Cincotta is the legendary (in our field at least) Chicago organizer who rallied people against redlining and helped build the movement that would win…
The answer for Congress and the stalled action on the sequester? Michigan has some winning ideas. Detroit, Mich., home to a very depressed local economy as well as one of the most segregated regions in our country ,wouldn’t seem like…
Immigration is finally Topic A. For many of us who have been working with low income people and disadvantaged communities, this day has been a long time coming. Even more interesting, according to Pew research, quoted this week in The…
If you didn't get a chance to yet, check out the roundup of Occupy Our Homes' 2nd day of action on Dec. 6. We ran a set of essays ealier this year about the potential—albeit uneasy at times—for cooperation between…
Jon Kest, director of New York Communities for Change, a founder of the Working Families Party, and former head organizer for the New York chapter of ACORN, died of cancer last Wednesday. He was 57. The New York Times, in…
It’s been an exciting year in labor organizing, between the Chicago teachers strike, Port of Oakland shut downs, Wal-Mart walkouts, and New York City’s multi-chain fast food workers’ walkout. Healthy, progressive labor organizing is essential to economic justice (negotiations can…
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I grew up in rural Iowa. During my childhood, my community was shaken by the collapse of family farms, the dismantling of the labor movement and the brutal restructuring of local economies. Even before I was old enough to articulate…
The value of community organizing was perhaps never questioned as much as when Barack Obama became a candidate for president in 2007. A field that was largely misunderstood (or even unknown) was suddenly thrust upon the American people as the…
This past Monday, I attended a large anti-fracking rally here in Albany, NY, aimed at convincing Governor Cuomo to ban the practice. For those not living in an area wracked by this controversy, fracking is a way to access…
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I extend condolences to Andrew Breitbart’s family. He died last week at the young age of 43. Because my brother died at age 36, I know how a sudden death of a young man shocks, saddens, and pains a family.…
The New Bottom Line, an alignment that is highlighted in the Fall 2011 issue of Shelterforce, recently received the "Most Valuable National Coaltion" honor from The Nation as part of the magazine's "Progressive Honor Roll": "Objecting to a politics that…
Criticized for focusing more on what it is against than what it is for, the Occupy Wall Street movement has now found an organizing issue it can embrace. Perhaps because so many Occupiers have recently been evicted from their encampments…
As readers of this blog likely know, today is the national kick-off for a new phase of the occupy movement intended to tackle the problem of vacant bank-owned homes and defending families under threat of foreclosure and eviction. Actions are…
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As the Occupy Wall Street protests continue in public settings all across the country, it’s interesting to watch how the movement begins to take shape at the community level as it’s discussed in our houses of worship, workplace, kitchen tables,…
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In her recent Mother Jones column, Barbara Ehrenreich writes “What the Occupy Wall Streeters are beginning to discover, and homeless people have known all along, is that most ordinary, biologically necessary activities are illegal when performed in American streets —…
A few years ago, Dave Beckwith, executive director of the Needmor Fund, wrote in Shelterforce about The ABCs of Organizing that offered an overview of some important books on organizing that provided valuable examples from the field replete with the challenges and setbacks, but also the wins that add reward to the work.
Beckwith notes that while books can tell stories, action is the only way to win. He even quotes Lee Staples’s Roots to Power: “[A] book can only point the way. It can’t take action. It can’t fight for economic and social justice…. Organize! Struggle! Become powerful!”
This sentiment is on full display all over the country right now, whether it’s by way of the Occupy Wall Street movement, The New Bottom Line, or other movements associated with bank accountability and economic justice. In fact, in the upcoming fall issue of Shelterforce, we will feature an entire package on organizing that includes an article co-written by SEIU’s Stephen Lerner and National People’s Action’s George Goehl on the New Bottom Line as well as a piece by Amy Schur, executive director of the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment about a new crop of activists getting involved in the bank accountability movement. They are taking action; they are becoming powerful. more
I find the occupation of Wall Street terribly exciting. But of course, this is not the first protest of this sort in response to the current mess. Nor are these the first arrests. Community organizing groups that in general reach…
In the winter 2010 issue of Shelterforce, we published an article, Organizing for Inclusive TOD that looked at various transit and transit oriented development projects around the country, and how organizing helped shape those projects, providing either affordable housing or rail service to communities that were not included in the original blueprints.
From the Bay Area to New Jersey to Atlanta, we saw how effective organizing changed once abstract plans into designs specifically tailored to the needs of the community, but there was one item that stood out: the Stops For Us campaign in the Twin Cities. There, community groups in one low-income neighborhood had to fight to not be skipped over by transit entirely.
“The goal of the $941 million Central Corridor Light Rail Transit (LRT) in Minneapolis and St. Paul is to connect the downtowns of the Twin Cities, moving people within a corridor that already has a high density of residents and jobs. The idea is less to focus on getting between St. Paul and Minneapolis fast than to encourage greater, more intense mixed-use development along the corridor.”
But three pivotal stops in historically low-income neighborhoods were omitted from original plans. In the Summer 2011 issue of Shelterforce, Tracy Babler, development and communications director of the Alliance for Metropolitan Stability, reports on Stops For Us, a coalition that pushed strongly for the inclusion of the three LRT stops:
“Although plans had been in the works since the 1980s, broad community interest in the Central Corridor was piqued when the line’s alignment and planned stations were announced in 2006. Notably absent were three stations that had been part of earlier concept designs. The now-missing stations were all in the eastern University Avenue section, where the largest populations of low-income people and people of color lived and where bus lines were both heavily used and few and far between.”
So what began as a piece of a broader look at inclusive TOD projects turned into a deep look at how a broad spectrum of community groups, all equipped with their own interests, came together for the purpose of providing rail service to an overlooked community (and they convinced the federal government to change its funding rules, to boot).
Read the article here. more
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Organizing is a culture. It’s not a tactic, a speech by a charismatic leader, or a department. “It’s a culture, and it’s what we do and don’t every single day,” said Michael Gecan, co-director of the Industrial Areas Foundation. Gecan…
At this point, we’re all versed in what’s turning out to be a pretty heroic stand held by public workers and advocates for sanity at the Wisconsin state house in response to Gov. Scott Walker’s attempt to effectively ban collective…
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National Housing Institute
