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The People Shall Rule: ACORN, Community Organizing, and the Struggle for Economic Justice
With the election of a community organizer as president of the United States, the time is right to evaluate the current state of community organizing and the effectiveness of ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now). Since 2002, ACORN has been dramatically expanding and raising its national profile; it has also been weathering controversy over its voter registration campaigns and an internal financial scandal.
The twelve chapters in this volume present the perspectives of insiders like founder Wade Rathke and leading outside practitioners and academics. The result is a thorough detailing of ACORN's founding and its changing strategies, including vivid accounts and analyses of its campaigns on the living wage, voter turnout, predatory lending, redlining, school reform, and community redevelopment, as well as a critical perspective on ACORN's place in the community organizing landscape.
The twelve chapters in this volume present the perspectives of insiders like founder Wade Rathke and leading outside practitioners and academics. The result is a thorough detailing of ACORN's founding and its changing strategies, including vivid accounts and analyses of its campaigns on the living wage, voter turnout, predatory lending, redlining, school reform, and community redevelopment, as well as a critical perspective on ACORN's place in the community organizing landscape.
300 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2009
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
November 25, 2021
Good read about the PHENOMENAL ACORN in its later years. A few takeaways:
- really struck by the ways ACORN broke out of stale characterizations of structure-based groups as slow or having boring action logic. In a fairly average campaign cycle, 60 chapters had over 400 direct actions over 3 months. And their actions were famously confrontational
- staff structure and culture: wanted a LOT more on this, but from what I did get I loveddd it. Lots of turnover and fairly huge staff.
- Built a base of 200,000 dues-paying poor and working class members. Dues collection was central to the organizing—upwards of half a field organizer’s work plan was 1-1s to collect dues.
- ACORN’s commitment to organizing the poor neighborhood by neighborhood built a very multiracial, and primarily Black and Latine, organization.
- just generally blown away by the movement and organizational scale, and the campaigning rigor they were able to maintain across the org
Wanted more on decision making within the movement!
- really struck by the ways ACORN broke out of stale characterizations of structure-based groups as slow or having boring action logic. In a fairly average campaign cycle, 60 chapters had over 400 direct actions over 3 months. And their actions were famously confrontational
- staff structure and culture: wanted a LOT more on this, but from what I did get I loveddd it. Lots of turnover and fairly huge staff.
- Built a base of 200,000 dues-paying poor and working class members. Dues collection was central to the organizing—upwards of half a field organizer’s work plan was 1-1s to collect dues.
- ACORN’s commitment to organizing the poor neighborhood by neighborhood built a very multiracial, and primarily Black and Latine, organization.
- just generally blown away by the movement and organizational scale, and the campaigning rigor they were able to maintain across the org
Wanted more on decision making within the movement!
Displaying 1 of 1 review