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...
How the Bay Area Got $2 Billion for Affordable Homes
San Francisco Bay Area voters approved bold new investments in 2016 after housing advocates--part of the Non-Profit Housing Association of Northern California--ignited a successful electoral strategy for the general election. Here's how it worked.
Grassroots Advocacy Strengthens Housing Trust Fund
Washington state housing activists came together in 1997 to launch the Housing Our Community Campaign to increase the state Housing Trust Fund (HTF) to...
Philadelphia Campaign Reshapes Homelessness Debate
For the past few years, homeless advocates in Philadelphia have made some remarkable strides in pushing for solutions to homelessness. Several distinct but overlapping...
Strategy Shift Yields Jobs from Marriott
A local organization affiliated with National People's Action, a 27-year-old coalition of grassroots neighborhood groups, won a public meeting with Chicago Police Superintendent Terry...
Putting “Community” Back in “CRA”
The Community Reinvestment Act and regulators have been unable to hold banks accountable to distant and distinct local communities—so nonprofits have stepped in to do the heavy lifting.
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.
Housing Is Health: Ballot Initiatives in California Approved
A conversation with three county supervisors who were instrumental in moving affordable housing ballot measures forward in the California Bay Area by bringing in the health factor.
Flipping the Script
A nonprofit forgoes the typical community meeting for a "living charrette," which leads to greater neighborhood feedback about a proposed 24-acre development in Austin, Texas.
Bringing Down the Barriers to Enrollment in Federal Programs
Constance Etheridge went to the Department of Social Services office in South Carolina for a simple reason: she and her children were hungry and...
Artists as Organizers
Creative placemaking means more than merely adding public art into the mix. To be sustainable it needs to build relationships—and power.
Make Your Nonprofit a Media Empire
Using soap operas and talk shows to mix entertainment with financial education
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...
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.
Gaining Ground by Holding Back
Late last year, St. Louis ACORN members learned that Regional Hospital – the city's only "safety net" hospital that guaranteed care regardless of ability...
The Right to Know
Josefina de la Cruz’s migration history does not stop at her arrival from Mexico in 1972, but continues through five different Chicago neighborhoods, most...
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...
Persistence Pays
Employees of Erickson Cosmetics Company (makers of Banana Boat lotion) only wanted what they had earned. Especially workers like Juana Vasquez who worked at...
Learning to Love Sticky Cities
Dispelling stereotypes, the Great Lakes Urban Exchange has set out to unite the Rust Belt, starting with restoration of the Great Lakes region and ending with equitable, sustainable transformation.
Organizing to Build a Movement
In December 1994, President Bill Clinton proposed converting public housing and project-based Section 8 into vouchers. House Speaker Newt Gingrich and Congressman Rick Lazio...
Big Island Organizing
An organizing drive in Hawaii has forced the hand of America's largest bank, achieving a breakthrough that has slashed foreclosures.
Affordable, But for Whom?
How a box of felt pieces helps organizers help New York communities advocate for their real affordable housing needs
Helping the Mayor Get Your Way
“We need more buses!” That’s what organizers with Miami’s congregation-based organizing group PACT (People Acting for Community Together) heard loud and clear as they...
Finding Common Ground
Everyone knows the real story of Las Vegas – enormous power concentrated in the hands of casinos, unchecked by government and oblivious to community...
Leveling the Playing Field
In 1997, a coalition of churches, environmental groups, developers, and government officials organized a campaign to help clean up Minnesota's 4,000 acres of brownfields,...
Housing, Not Warehousing—A Victory 10 Years in the Making
Warehousing is one of real estate’s best-kept secrets, and a crucial piece of how the housing market can keep supply low and demand high. One New York City organization rallied to prove warehousing still posed a problem, and pushed the boundaries of what was politically possible.
Thirsty for Justice
Some 200 miles from the Mexican border, residents of New Mexico’s 23-year-old Pajarito Mesa community pay taxes but lack essential services like roads, electricity...
How Organizing for Justice Helps Your Mental Health
How do social justice, organizing, and mental health interact? Shelterforce chats with clinical social worker Dawn Belkin Martinez to find out.
The Fight to Save Section 8
In April 2004, when the Bush Administration launched a major assault on the program that helps Marion Brady pay her rent, she sprang into...
New Jersey’s Campaign Against Lead
The effects of lead poisoning on a child’s physical and emotional development and cognitive ability are well known. An investigation that ran two years...
Winning a War, But Losing the Battle
Victory in a tenant organizing campaign is usually defined by improving conditions for the tenants involved – an egregious repair problem is fixed, landlord...
No Place for Us
The low-income students living in Irvine Meadows West, a historic trailer park at the University of California, Irvine, received more than a liberal arts...
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...
A Battle for Wards in New Jersey’s Hub City
How an organization of residents crossing age, race, and socioeconomic lines took on an unyielding City Hall known for quelling grass-roots efforts and (almost) overtook the political party machinery.
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...
Oakland Campaign Puts Kids First
Low-income youth and youth of color are often first to feel the effects of shrinking local human service budgets. In Oakland, California – across...
Occupy Makes Space for Community Advocates
By smashing the wall of media silence about America’s wealth and income divide, the Occupy movement has opened a dramatically new terrain for organizations...
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...
A Neighborhood in Brooklyn Says "No" to Worker Exploitation
A language barrier, I believe, has muddled my conversation with Nieves Padilla. “We’re fighting to get the workers on Knickerbocker Avenue the minimum wage,”...
Alameda Corridor Jobs Coalition Wins Railroad Jobs
In 1997, residents of Los Angeles area neighborhoods in the path of what will be the largest public/private rail transportation project in the country...
In Red State Florida, Victory for Working People
While 52 percent of Floridians voted for George Bush in the November election, 72 percent backed a Bush-unfriendly ballot initiative: a constitutional amendment raising...
Tenderloin Senior Organizing Project
"It's hard to do this – I was scared," said Robin King, one of the younger women living in a building organized by the...
Don’t Start Small
It’s often said that organizers should begin with easily attainable goals to bolster their group’s confidence. But Caroline Murray, executive director of the Anti-Displacement...
Organize! A media campaign on the value of affordable housing
Advocates for affordable housing and a high-powered public relations firm make an unlikely team, at first glance. But that’s exactly who teamed up over...
Occupy Wall Street: A New Wave of Fair Housing Activism?
Is there a new community reinvestment movement afoot?
A Matter of Trust
Although a March 2007 Zogby International poll found that affordable housing was an important election issue, most elected officials have yet to place creating...
Divide and Conquer
In its one and a half years, the New York City Coalition for the Preservation of Gardens (known as the Garden Coalition) has worked...
Economic Rights are Human Rights
Families with nowhere else to go often wind up staying at a modest row house on a side street off Kensington Avenue, a downtrodden,...
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.
Using Information to Confront Corporate Power
In 1991 the United Steelworkers of America, locked in a bitter labor dispute with Ravenswood Aluminum Co., decided to extend the battle beyond the...
Public Land Should be Used for Public Good
When a vacant lot in Oakland was close to becoming the home of a 24-story, market-rate development, local activists worked together to prevent it from happening.
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...
Park 1 – Stadium 0: The People Win!
In April 1996 residents of Newark's Ironbound neighborhood – an old industrial area now home to a thriving immigrant population – read in a...
High Stakes for Public Housing: Organizing Public Housing Residents
The Millennial Housing Commission (MHC) report represents stage two in an agenda to give increased decision-making powers to local public housing agencies, and target...
From Brooklyn to Berlin: Organizing Schoeneweide
The scene looks familiar enough. In a foyer outside an elegant legislative chamber, a group of citizens is pigeonholing their local politicians. A vote...
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...
Beating Bank-Owned Blight
When Oakland residents raised hell about trashed foreclosed houses harming their neighborhoods, the city got on board and changed the way it handles code violations on bank-owned properties.
Improving Schools from the Bottom Up
Two years ago, when Oakland ACORN was considering a new citywide initiative, members voiced one concern loud and clear: the poor conditions of the...
Vertical Integration
When Vickie Stapleton’s landlord announced his intention to terminate his project-based Section 8 contract with HUD last year, she got nervous. “A lot of...
A Decade of Growth
Institution-based community organizations tackle the challenges of the new millennium at the local, state, and national level
Rhode Island Tenants Fight and Win!
On August 1, 2005, 193 residents at the Barbara Jordan I properties in Providence, Rhode Island, received a letter informing them that the owner...
Fighting for Worker's Rights in Maine
Years of alleged wage, immigration, safety, and civil rights violations, environmental sanctions, and other infractions at the DeCoster egg farm in Turner, Maine, have...
Patience and Politics
State education departments are always looking for ways to improve low-performing schools, and not always finding them. In 1992, the Texas Education Agency agreed...
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...
Building A Power Base
The first and most important battle organizers face is working with members to build an independent power base. Building an organization, and forcing a...
Winning a Land Bank We Can Trust
Lessons from Philadelphia's Campaign to Take Back Vacant Land
Once a Landmark, Always a Landmark
The Winthrop, a grand hotel converted to affordable housing in the 1970s, was at the center of a conflict between the city’s hopes for...
Demanding a Better Deal
Save Middle East Action Committee (SMEAC) was created in 2001 by community stakeholders and representatives in Baltimore after the local newspaper announced that they...
Clearing the Air
The Bronx neighborhood of Hunts Point has one of the highest asthma rates in the world. Home to the world's largest food distribution center,...
Money Doesn't Always Win
"You know, LeRoy, money always wins."
At those words, LeRoy Lemos sprang into action. Lemos, a community activist and director of the PODER Project in...
"No Evictions. We Won't Move!"
"This land is too valuable to permit poor people to park on it."
-Justin Herman, former executive director of the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency, 1970
The...
San Francisco Housing Activists Win Land and Shift the Debate
On May 11, 2004, homeless people in San Francisco scored a victory by convincing the city’s Board of Supervisors to set aside 15 city-owned...
Holding Politicians Accountable
The elections of 1994 demonstrated the power of constituent organizing (mostly done by the right wing), the dissatisfaction of many voters with the current...
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...
Still Riding Route 61
A labor/community partnership stops a fare hike and gives workers a boost
Renters Rising
How San Francisco’s housing movement turned an assault on renters into a victory
Injecting Racial Equity into an Election Cycle in St. Louis
A group of 10 St. Louis organizations joined together to encourage mayoral candidates to address racial equity and make it a focal point in an election.
A Guide for Tenants on Leadership and Building Control
Renters in Washington, DC’s Shaw neighborhood have a little extra help these days as they organize to improve their living conditions – and maybe...
Alabama Arise Fights For Tenant Protections
It was hardly an unusual story in 1993 in Montgomery, Alabama. A tenant had spent months trying to get her landlord to fix a...
Housing Advocates Track Indoor Environmental Hazards to Spur Improvements
When the community health promoters of San Diego’s Environmental Health Coalition (EHC) say they’re doing pollution testing, many people probably imagine samples from the...
Building a Better City: Europe’s Affordable Housing Standard
In the United States, nonprofit builders of affordable housing often compete against each other as well as against larger, better-capitalized private builders for limited...
Getting New Jersey to Divest from Payday Lending
NJ Citizen Action says having a state pension fund invested, even indirectly, in a form of lending illegal in the state cannot stand.
Homeownership Counselors—And Organizers, Too!
Northwest Side Housing Center combines counseling and organizing to empower homeowners facing foreclosure.
Living Wage Lives in L.A.
It was 1996, and an economic Godzilla loomed over Los Angeles, coming to crush the city's precarious prosperity. That, at least, was the way...
Not Another Parking Lot
Fight City Hall - and WIN!
It took almost a year, but solid strategic planning and tenacious grassroots organizing paid off for affordable housing activists...
Tenant Organizing Wins One-for-One Replacement
In 1996, a small group of highly organized residents of North Beach public housing in San Francisco began to raise questions about the fate...
Organizing with the State on Your Side
In California, municipalities are required by law to plan for their fair share of affordable housing. Has this put housing advocates out of a...
New CDC Trade Association Lays Infrastructure
As sequestration takes hold and Congress wrestles with FY 2014 budget negotiations, the affordable housing and community development field is in a fragile state....
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.
Building For the Future
The supply of affordable housing in the San Francisco Bay Area is expected to increase in the next five years because of an innovative...
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.
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...
A Word of Caution: The Forgotten Photograph
The trouble with many of us, and with our culture as a whole, is that we don’t take time to “relate,” to connect formally...
A Surprising Victory
When business leaders in St. Louis withdrew financial support for a campaign to pass a badly needed transit tax, it was a blessing in disguise.
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...
Walking the Walk
In a city full of problems and promise, I'm taking the first steps toward learning up close what community organizing can accomplish.
Homeless Revolution
An organization of homeless New Yorkers rallied residents of Harlem and Manhattan to stand up and take notice of the city's long-standing practice of warehousing vacant properties.