Another Win for Colorado workers! An additional 30,000 Coloradans working in the food and beverage manufacturing industry now qualify for emergency paid leave - including thousands of UFCW Local 7R members! Read more HERE

HOUSTON – Alba Garcia, 51, has a decision to make. Does she pay rent Wednesday or does she buy food for her 7-year-old daughter?
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“Maybe I should try and pay my rent because I can’t bear for me and my daughter to be on the streets. I can beg for food but I can’t lose my apartment," she said in Spanish. Joe Higgs, an organizer for The Metropolitan Organization (TMO) acted as a translator. TMO works with Holy Ghost Catholic Church where Garcia is a member.  Story here

Colorado emergency child care expands to include grocery, construction workers

The announcement came after two groups representing grocery and food processing workers — Coloradans for the Common Good and the state grocery workers union, United Food and Commercial Workers — urged Gov. Jared Polis and other state officials to give such workers the same kinds of protections available to front-line health workers.

Chalkbeat story here

500 leaders, from close to 30 institutions around the Denver Metro area, gathered last night for the Founding Assembly of Coloradans for the Common Good.
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Candidates from Denver, JeffCo and Aurora showed up and committed their support to the organization's agenda.

In a public hearing on the topic Wednesday in Denver, labor advocates pushed for two key changes. They want all industries covered under state rules, and they want a minimum salary cutoff for when overtime must be paid added.

“Workers need to be paid fairly for the work they do,” argued Marilyn Winokur, a Denver resident, with the Colorado Industrial Areas Foundation. “It is not good for Colorado workers to be overworked and underpaid.”
More
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Neto's Tucson: Ana Chavarin is a single mom, an immigrant and a success
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Avigail Rodriguez, a former Project Quest student, works in the emergency room at Metropolitan Methodist Hospital in San Antonio as a registered nurse. The training helped her nearly triple her wage.
Credit: Joanna Kulesza for The New York Times

​Job Training Can Change Lives.
​See How San Antonio Does It.
A program with an intensive approach offers a rare success story in producing lasting wage gains.
​Its guiding principle: “We will not let them fail.”
By Nelson D. Schwartz
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After word spread that Sister Christine Stephens had passed away, I tried explaining who she was to a friend who had never met her.  Words tumbled out - “formidable, smart, compassionate, thoughtful, a towering figure, someone who had to be reckoned with by friend and foe, impossible to ignore, zeroed in on what mattered".  

“She was all that,” I said, “and more.”  “She relished a fight, and even picked some, but never with the intent of humiliating an adversary much less punching down to weakness.”

EBR Metro Council approves first industrial tax break since adopting ITEP-related guidelines.  Advocate story here.
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"Franklin D. Roosevelt is reported to have said about the need for a specific policy initiative, "Okay, you've convinced me. Now go out there and organize and create a constituency to make me do it." I fear that too many progressives are still caught up in the "convincing," when what we need now is the constituency-and people who are willing to think hard about how to create, sustain, and energize that constituency."   More from still timely piece in Boston Review.
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Together Louisiana just beat back an attempt at legislative subterfuge to undermine local control over industrial tax exemptions.

Senator Bodi White tried to use the conference committee process to throw out the ENTIRE CONTENT of a resolution he sponsored, replacing it, whole cloth, with the language of a bill to undermine local control over industrial tax exemptions that had been defeated 5 TIMES this session already.

The trickery passed the Senate unanimously, with no one, it seems, catching what was going on. It was set for a House floor vote Thursday afternoon.
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Rep. Ted James caught the dirty trick and alerted Together Louisiana.
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TLA sent out an action alert at 2:37pm. And here's what happened next:

PRESS CONFERENCE
Who: Delta Interfaith with Together Louisiana
When: Thursday, May 30, 2pm
Where: State Capitol in Baton Rouge (foot of the front steps of the Capitol building)
Topic: Expose and seek action on illegal activity costing East Carroll Parish $6.2 million in tax revenue
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Dear friends,
They say Lake Providence and East Carroll Parish, where I live and work, is the "poorest place in America." 
Something shocking has taken place in that place.

​More than $6 million in local tax revenue -- funds that would have gone to our public schools, roads and essential services -- has been taken from East Carroll Parish due to illegal actions by both governmental and corporate entities.

​Sister Bernie Barrett
Delta Interfaith (part of Together Louisiana)

The new Together Louisiana report introduces the #ReverseRobinhoodIndex, which shows - Parish by Parish - that ITEP reform can lower the property taxes for homeowners and small businesses. Read the full report to see what that would mean for your Parish.

Download the new Reverse Robinhood report HERE. ?

#ReverseRobinhood #KeepItLocal#TogetherLouisiana #TogetherLA #ITEP#Louisiana #EconomicDevelopment

SB201 creating a payday lending database was signed into law by Governor Sisolak. The bill faced powerful opposition from the lending industry that was overcome by the organized people power of Nevadans for the Common Good. 

What Happened in Vegas​ - Battling Nevada's Underage Sex Trade (Commonweal, September 9, 2015): Andrea Swanson was raised in a Catholic military family in Virginia and married a military man. Her husband, Rod, served as an officer in the U.S. Army, became an FBI agent, then rose to supervision of the Joint Terrorism Task Force in Las Vegas. That’s where the couple raised their four children, two girls and two boys. Read more​

 AMOS leaders asked, "What matters enough to you, your family, and your community that you would raise your own taxes to see it happen?”

AMOS got answers from a broad community consultation then flexed its political muscle to link a new tax to concrete improvements:

• Libraries in Des Moines will expand the number of days they are open from 5 days per week to 6 days per week, while the Downtown and Franklin branches will open 7; 
• 4-6 new Rental Inspectors will be hired to improve rental housing conditions;
• 150 dilapidated and abandoned homes will be torn down or renovated each year across the city, a ten-fold increase over the 5-15 homes the city is able to address now.
• Des Moines will help fund the creation of mental health crisis services for children, with a commitment from the Mayor and other public officials to get these services up and running by June 30, 2020. 

The one-cent tax will also enable the city to maintain 13 firefighter positions, speed up the building of a new fire station on the northeast side of Des Moines, and make critical investments to improve streets, sidewalks, and sewers. 

An February 25th, the city council approved funding to install lights on the basketball courts at Evelyn K Davis Park — another AMOS priority.

Lobbyists for the lenders acted as if enforcement of existing laws would be something akin to mass extinction for their industry.  Breathless predictions of doom bordered on the hysterical.

​This was a head-scratcher for members of Nevadans for the Common Good (NCG), a non-partisan, valley-wide federation of 47 faith-based, labor, and non-profit organizations. NCG threw its support behind the proposal sponsored by Sen. Yvanna Cancela and supported by the Legal Aid Center of Southern Nevada because the personal stories of those caught in the debt cycle — taking out one loan to pay off another — extend deep into its membership.  More.
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Story credit W/[email protected]

In the face of a growing humanitarian crisis at the border, Albuquerque Interfaith has been at the forefront of a local response, mobilizing institutions to address the immediate needs of recent arrivals and building a longer-term strategy and constituency for change.
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In March, when asylum seekers began to arrive in Albuquerque without advance notice, Albuquerque Interfaith leaders stepped up to the challenge. Within a month, in collaboration with Catholic Charities and the City of Albuquerque, leaders built a coalition of agencies to respond to increasing numbers of asylum seekers coming to the city.

Project QUEST Creates Largest, Sustained Earnings Rise in Nation: Study proves it: Nine Year Gains: Project QUEST's Continuing Impact, Economic Mobility Corporation (2019)
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In the face of a growing humanitarian crisis at the border, Albuquerque Interfaith has been at the forefront of a local response, mobilizing institutions to address the immediate needs of recent arrivals and building a longer-term strategy and constituency for change.  This week, Albuquerque Interfaith and partners packed city council chambers in support of a $250,000 appropriation to the humanitarian crisis.  45 speakers spoke in support of the appropriation, including Catholic Archbishop John Wester and leaders from a broad swath of religious and nonprofit institutions.   More from SWIAF.

Want to learn more about how to organize the IAF way?  Buy one of these  great booklets by a master of the craft here.
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In a year when countless political campaigns are “staffing up”, recruiting volunteers, and raising money, Central Texas Interfaith is doing the same, but with a different focus: aggressively building a broad and diverse collective of 500 leaders. Over the next 7 months, CTI will attempt to double its base of core leaders at its congregations, schools, unions, and social service organizations to fight for families and the issues affecting them: affordable housing, workforce development, living wages, local control, immigration, safe neighborhoods, and healthcare. Simply put, the goal of our “500 LEADERS CAMPAIGN” is to build the largest non-partisan, broad-based political organization in Central Texas.  Full story here.
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One month after 300 Texas IAF leaders descended on the Capitol to call for investments in human development, delegations have been visiting the Capitol daily to engage legislators around school finance, the ACE fund, payday lending and infrastructure support for economically distressed areas. ​

Nevadans for the Common Good
May 10 at 7:02 PM · NCG made their presence known when 50 leaders all wearing white showed up in full force at the Assembly Commerce and Labor Committee hearing of SB201 - the payday lending bill that will protect consumers! Leaders shared testimony about the impact of predatory lending practices and left encouraged and optimistic that the community and assembly members are seeing the importance of passing this bill. As Assemblywoman Carlton said, we are tired of waiting for something to be done to protect our families and communities! The fight is not over yet, but we are going in the right direction! Thank you all for showing up in support and for those who testified.
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Our Views: Don’t put in a one-sided industry fix for their big tax break
- ADVOCATE EDITORIAL BOARD

Forceful, compassionate and persistent Sarabia helped transform San Antonio, Texas into a better place as the cut out and shut out gained powerful voice.  Through more than four decades of work with Communities Organized for Public Service (COPS) and continuing with COPS/Metro he helped reinvent IAF organizing during his storied life.  
Story in the Rivard Report HERE.
Story in San Antonio Express-News.
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