ACORN

The loss of ACORN and changes in election laws could keep young people from voting in 2012. Will community-based efforts to engage young, disenfranchised voters fill the vacuum?

Editors of sat down recently with John Atlas, NHI board president and author of Seeds of Change: The Story of ACORN, America’s Most Controversial Antipoverty Community Organizing Group, to discuss the organization itself, as well as organizing on a national level, tensions between organizing and development, and lessons learned from the downfall of the once-powerful antipoverty organization.

After a brief, shining moment following the 2008 Republican National Convention, when it seemed community organizers would rule the country, they are now back on the defensive.

Organizing has been under attack for years, but this time around, the media has been directly complicit in severely damaging one of most influential advocates for low- and moderate-income families in the country. How did the media miss the real story behind the assault on ACORN?

By now, most Americans have heard of ACORN. We know them as the national anti-poverty group, which uses community organizing to provide invaluable services to our communities, pressure powerful banks […]

Over the past few years faith-based organizing networks have broken onto the national organizing scene, adding grass-roots power and issue expertise to some of the biggest problems of the day.

Note: This profile is part of a series, “Saving Affordable Housing,” which begins with an introduction here.Single-Family Community Land Trust Housing Chicago is a city of neighborhoods,[14] harboring hundreds of […]

As the ACORN Tenant Union comes near to completing its first full year of organizing public housing residents, with 150 developments organized representing some 38,000 public housing tenants across the […]