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.
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....
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...
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.
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Occupy Wall Street: A New Wave of Fair Housing Activism?
Is there a new community reinvestment movement afoot?