WADE RATHKE is the founder of ACORN, Chief Organizer at ACORN International, and Author of "Nuts & Bolts", "Citizen Wealth", "Global Grassroots", and "The Battle for the 9th Ward".
Pearl River There’s something happening to community organizing, and it’s not a good thing. The job is being expropriated and defanged of its critical content and its bottom-up push for peoples’ power by corporate and political interests. This isn’t necessarily a new phenomenon, but it’s getting out of control and subverting the very practice and …
New York City Showing the documentary, “The Organizer,” in Harlem, it was fun talking to old veterans, Jeff Elmer and Mariana Davenport, and hearing of others. Emma Graves-Fitzsimmons and I got a big laugh in the Q&A after the film when I acknowledged her as a daughter of organizers in the ACORN family after …
New Orleans Randy Shaw, the executive director of the Tenderloin Housing Clinic and its burgeoning empire, first challenged me to think about whether the new FLSA overtime guidelines would prevent any future prospects of building a farmworkers’ movement or an ACORN, both of which famously focused on building an army of volunteer and professional organizers …
Nairobi A highlight whenever I’m in Nairobi is the opportunity to meet and dialogue with community organizers who are part of COPA Kenya, the Community Organization Practitioners Association of Kenya, and a unique professional association of organizers. We had what they call a “sharing” in which ACORN Kenya’s organizers, David Musungu and Sammy Ndirangu joined …
Waveland The activist and academically oriented quarterly journal, Social Policy, trades out subscriptions with a publication called Shelterforce, which, as the name indicates, specializes in housing related issues. A random email called “rooflines” that I get from time to time featured their best articles of the year. Scrolling through, one piece caught my eye because …