Government-Funded Organizing?
Public funding for community organizing would strengthen our democracy and re-legitimize a beleaguered public sector. It's time to stop writing off the idea.
A Decade of Growth
Institution-based community organizations tackle the challenges of the new millennium at the local, state, and national level
Winning a Land Bank We Can Trust
Lessons from Philadelphia's Campaign to Take Back Vacant Land
Affordable, But for Whom?
How a box of felt pieces helps organizers help New York communities advocate for their real affordable housing needs
City Life and Occupy: A Developing Relationship
This past August, a broad new coalition in Boston formed to plan a massive march against Bank of America and other corporate targets on...
Cross-Community Collaboration on NYC’s Municipal ID Program
Lack of identification hurts many different groups in different ways—from the homeless to immigrants, and they all need to be considered in the fight for an alternative.
Occupying Occupy: Lessons from Central Brooklyn
A few months ago I was scheduled to moderate a panel on how the Occupy movement would affect the foreclosure crisis happening in New...
Fighting Gentrification Through Collective Bargaining
For the past two years, the Crown Heights Tenant Union of Brooklyn has turned collective bargaining strategies on landlords—and policymakers.
Thirty-Five Years of Building Citizen Power
The 2008 presidential contest vaulted community organizing into the national limelight, as the McCain campaign sought to cast doubt on the legitimacy of Barack...
Listen To Me
When Dolores Shaw first got involved with the Eastern Pennsylvania Organizing Project (EPOP) eight years ago, she had two children entering school and a...
All Organizing is Constant Re-organizing
In 1990, a manufacturing plant in San Antonio laid off more than 1,000 employees, most of them Mexican-American women with limited formal education. The...
Living in the Buffer
Preventing the development of new affordable housing in close proximity to freeways isn't a just solution to the health effects of LA's air pollution.
Involving union welfare office workers in welfare organizing
The Organization of the NorthEast (ONE) has over 70 members: religious congregations, social service agencies, ethnic associations and businesses from three diverse lakefront Chicago...
Making a Success of Local Hire
Local hire policies are among the strongest strategies for bringing good job opportunities to disadvantaged communities, but adding more provisions to specifically target those with the most barriers to employment can make local hiring practices even more effective.
A Victory Over the Slumlords
When the last light in her hallway at the Juanita Apartments in Burien, a working-class city just south of Seattle, burned out in January...
National Collaboration Drives Transportation Policy
On August 12, 1998, almost 1000 leaders from 14 states gathered in St. Thomas the Apostle Catholic Church in Chicago, Illinois, for a one-of-a-kind...
Organizing Lessons from Allen Parkway Village
When Lenwood E. Johnson, the son of Texas sharecroppers, moved into Houston’s Allen Parkway Village project housing, the Freedmen’s Town section of the city...
Housing Set-Asides: An Idea Whose Time Has Come
In August 2002, Kevin Jackson, director of the Chicago Rehab Network, sent a letter out to network members and supporters to introduce a campaign...
Organize! Shedding Some Light on Fighting the Right
Draconian cutbacks in health, welfare and housing services, attacks on the civil rights of people of color, gays and lesbians, immigrants, and the reproductive...
Greater Boston Interfaith Organization
Massachusetts has one of the nation’s worst housing cost problems. Its rents and home prices have risen at one of the steepest rates in...