Keisha Krumm speaks at a news conference at City Hall in 2015 at which Nationstar Mortgage announced it would contribute $30.5 million to help Sherman Park homeowners recover from the foreclosure crisis. Photo courtesy of Common Ground. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Milwaukee is a city that does not strengthen the hand of the poor. It seems, instead, to be satisfied with kind gestures of charity toward the symptoms of unfairness. Pope Pius XI said, “Charity will never be true charity unless it takes justice into account…. Let no one attempt with small gifts of charity to exempt themselves from the great duties imposed by justice.” My over eight years in Milwaukee as Common Ground’s Executive Director and Lead Organizer has been dedicated to building justice with and for those left behind in this city. Common Ground has created controversy and tension, including pushing big banks and billionaires to recalculate their civic interest in broader terms. I am proud that we have had the moral courage to demand more than just charity for neighborhoods, education, health care, and housing. Keisha Krumm's Full Op Ed in Urban Milwaukee here. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Keisha Krumm has been organizing over 17 years with the IAF, including 8.5 years as the Lead Organizer for Common Ground, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. She can be reached kmkrumm@gmail.com
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Developers and community groups are monitoring these parcels closely. To show activists the projects under development or soon to be, the Washington Interfaith Network ran several bus tours this year. Tour guides noted potential conflicts as the city seeks to reap new tax revenue while requiring developers to include socially desirable, if less profitable, features.
“At some point, you realize there’s just a machine that’s running,” said the Rev. Frankey Grayton, pastor of Edgewood Baptist Church in Washington and a prominent activist with WIN. “The development is happening at an alarming rate.” Read the rest of the story in the NY Times here.
From the Washington Post:
One person who recognizes this disparity is Mike Gecan, senior organizer at Metro Industrial Areas Foundation based in Chicago. In something of a unique social experiment, Gecan is attempting to address obstacles faced by populations who are disadvantaged by residing in far-off areas of the map. Opinion piece here.
EBR Metro Council approves first industrial tax break since adopting ITEP-related guidelines. Advocate story here.
"THIS IS A HISTORIC DAY FOR STATE EMPLOYEES AND ALL NEVADANS, AS COLLECTIVE BARGAINING RIGHTS WILL MEAN A VOICE ON THE JOB TO MAKE MEANINGFUL CHANGES."
Common Dreams story by Jake Johnson here.
Angry seniors today raise hell against a mayor who a year ago made them a promise to build $500 million in new affordable senior housing, then turned his back and flew to Iowa to sell his brand of progressivism on the national market.
We echo the frustration of the men and women of East Brooklyn Congregations and Metro Industrial Areas Foundation as today, at the end of their ropes, they call for Mayor de Blasio to “step up or step down." NY Daily News Editorial
Volkswagen was wooed to Chattanooga in 2008 with a $554 million subsidy package from the state and local governments.
It was the largest taxpayer handout ever given to a foreign-owned automaker up to that moment, and remains the largest subsidy deal in Tennessee history. The deal came free of any job or investment requirements. “The only commitment that was made to the state was to keep the plant nonunion. It wasn’t to be safe or pay well or provide a great work environment,” said maintenance worker Gary Swafford. “It’s flabbergasting.” Full story in Labor Notes here.
"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.
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.
Rep. Ted James caught the dirty trick and alerted Together Louisiana.
TLA sent out an action alert at 2:37pm. And here's what happened next:
Miracle Workers
"The grand challenge that Arendt gave herself was the retrieval of the words most associated with politics—and therefore the words most ravaged through centuries of overuse and distortion." Read the smart, timely piece here.
Over the course of my organizing career with IAF that spanned forty years I can’t recall a strategic idea worth pursuing or a tactic worth implementing that didn’t derive from relational meetings. My recollections in many cases include the exact moment when the spark occurred: The ashen face of a parent in Las Vegas describing the pimping of her child for sex; the tight jaw of a woman despondent over the number of children running loose after school in her neighborhood; the depression of a man whose year of government funded “job training” ended with no job in sight; an immigrant describing his ordeal crossing the border.
———————————————————————-- “Power before program” is one of IAF Co-Director Ernie Cortes’ signature organizing mantras. Implicit in his exhortation is adoption of IAF’s methodological innovations - first and foremost relational meetings, one to one, that are practices for building power. Strategic, tactical and methodological innovations circle back on one another in a virtuous circle. Where the power of IAF citizen organizations is successfully exercised, business as usual is disrupted as public space opens for more citizen leaders to impact public life with fresh initiatives, energy and action. Troubled democracies everywhere need more of this. Their survival may depend on it.
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 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
Claiming credit where credit is due: AMOs (IAF in Des Moines, Iowa) Spurs City improvements5/27/2019
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:
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.
Story credit W/SWIAF@swiaf.org
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.
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. The Best of the Best: Project Quest backed by COPs/Metro leads the nation in Workforce development5/24/2019
Project QUEST Creates Largest, Sustained Earnings Rise in Nation: Study proves it: Nine Year Gains: Project QUEST's Continuing Impact, Economic Mobility Corporation (2019)
The forces behind HB 76, however, are still at work at the Capitol, pushing HB 76 again and other similar bills designed to help industry circumvent their fair share of property taxes.
Chris Hedges gave this talk to 27 graduating students who were formerly incarcerated—several of whom he taught in prison—and their families at Rutgers University on Friday. The ceremony was held by the Mountainview Program at Rutgers, which helps students complete their degrees at Rutgers after they take college courses inside prisons through the New Jersey Scholarship and Transformative Education in Prisons Consortium (NJ-STEP) program. Read a transcript of his speech or watch a video of the address linked here.
In a spirited community forum on Sunday, May 19, 2019, Virginians Organized for Interfaith Community Engagement (VOICE) obtained commitments from the Democratic Party contenders for Chairman of the Board of Supervisors on a range of important local issues, to include millions more dollars in County funding for affordable housing projects, and an expansion of the legal defense fund for local immigrants who are in the country illegally.
“VOICE can be the difference in this election,” VOICE leaders told people at the packed-out Bethlehem Baptist Church of Gum Springs, which hosted the event. “We can get more done together than we can apart, and we will apply pressure.” Hunt Herald story by Lori Ostrow here.
At his core, Alinsky was an educator who taught economically-disadvantaged Americans to confront systematic racism and classism and, most importantly, develop a set of public skills that allowed them to get what they deserved, namely, fair and decent housing, equitable pay, and basic city services. And, as I explain in this article, Alinsky did all this with a large dose of humor, irreverence, and ridicule toward authority figures. The complete article here.
VOICE/IAF message to politicians: one fairfax (Virginia)! Ambitious agenda drives major action5/20/2019 Metro IAF Metro IAF's V.O.I.C.E. Virginians Organized for Interfaith Community Engagement action on candidates to support vision: Over 625 VOICE leaders challenged four candidates running for board of supervisor chair to respond to VOICE’s vision of "One Fairfax” at Bethlehem Baptist on Sunday. VOICE leaders demanded action & lifted up specific solutions to do so, including: |