Community Organizing // Current

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Community Organizing in the Age of Obama

Community organizing has become "cool," at least according to the New York Times, but will the Obama movement survive... more

GRITtv
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Acting up #5: Willing to risk arrest

I answer a question about the value of mass protest and risking arrest, and move on to talk about community organizing, and how... more

joshuakahnrussell
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Community Organizers Come to Washington

Barack Obama said he would bring change to Washington. Community organizers are making sure he upholds that promise.

GRITtv
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Inaugurate Change

Please visit Worldchanging's Inaugurate Change campaign to add your name to this letter that will urge Obama's... more

uppityprogressive
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Mark Winston Griffith: We Are Acorn

We are ACORN. The right wing attack on the community organizing group ACORN is a frontal assault on all of us who fight for social and economic justice. Look, ACORN may alienate many, even those on their left, by their style of organizing, but they are one of us, and we better close ranks around them, because the barrel of the right-wing attack gun is really focused on you and me.

Conservatives are charging that ACORN has been running voter registration fraud rings in states like Ohio and Nevada. I don't know what the facts on the ground in Ohio and Nevada are, but it's clear that the right wing has declared open season on ACORN and all that it stands for, no matter how many lies need to be told to do it. Have you heard the one about how ACORN and the Community Reinvestment Act, the 1977 anti-red-lining law, actually forced banks to lower their lending criteria, which then led to the subprime crisis?

Implicated are those of us who used the CRA to get banks to own up to their obligations in disenfranchised neighborhoods, while fighting against subprime predatory lending. Most subprime lenders were not even covered by the CRA. And the suggestion that people of color and low income areas are inherently high risk and unworthy of credit, is patently racist.

And then there's the disparagement of community organizing and the depiction of ACORN as another un-american group linked to Barack Obama. John McCain said, "We need to know the full extent of Senator Obama's relationship with ACORN, who is now on the verge of maybe perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voter history in this country, maybe destroying the fabric of democracy"

Huh? The real fraud is the notion that organizing and registering people to vote represent anything other than the purest and most effective forms of democratic action.

ACORN has acknowledged its organizational missteps, like the recent embezzlement scandal that forced out their former head organizer. And if there was indeed wide-spread voter registration fraud, ACORN needs to address that aggressively. ACORN is a large and often unwieldy organization. It needs a better system of management and better control over the people who are representing them at all levels of the organization. I've talked to the current head of ACORN, Bertha Lewis, and she knows this.

ACORN routinely confronts powerful people and institutions and holds them accountable. The better job it does, the more it will be hunted down by those who don't like being publically shamed by low-income black and brown people demanding wage increases, fighting for affordable housing, trying to end predatory lending, or registering people in states that will determine the outcome of a historic general election.

As a progressive community, we have an obligation to call out ACORN on their stuff. But we also have an obligation to stick up for one of the most effective grassroots social justice organizations this nation has ever seen, an organization that stands on the frontlines everyday, taking body blows for all of us.

Mark Winston Griffith is a Senior Fellow, Economic Justice, at the Drum Major Institute for Public Policy.We are ACORN. The right wing attack on the community organizing group ACORN is a frontal assault on all of us who fight for social... more