Nuts & Bolts: The Fundamentals of Organizing
Wade Rathke shares almost 50 years of experience of organizing experience with a look at the “nuts and bolts” of how ACORN was organized and able to build mass membership and major victories in the United States, Canada. and around the world in plain language that can inform organizers, leaders, activists, and policymakers about how to change and build.
Citizen Wealth: Winning the Campaign to Save Working Families
America’s safety net is torn and tattered. Income inequality continues to grow—the gap between rich and poor has expanded fivefold in the last 25 years. For millions of working families achieving basic middle class comforts has begun to seem as distant a dream as winning the lottery. What is needed, and what veteran organizer and ACORN founder Wade Rathke provides in this hard-hitting new book, is a comprehensive grassroots strategy to create what he calls citizen wealth: an enduring foundation on which working people can build a future that extends beyond paying next month’s rent.
Global Grassroots: Perspectives on International Organizing
Global Grassroots is a new compilation edited by ACORN founder and Social Policy editor Wade Rathke. With essays from organizers new and old Global Grassroots looks at the emerging consensus – and emerging differences – in the field of organizing.
The Battle for the Ninth Ward: ACORN, The Rebuilding of New Orleans, and the Lessons of Disaster.
In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, urban planners, pundits and corporate power-brokers wrote off the iconic Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans as uninhabitable for its African-American community, who were denied the right of return to the homes they had lived in for generations. Two years on the Lower Ninth, the touchstone for every debate about the city’s future, has become a unique example of success in a city still struggling to reconstruct itself. In this agenda-setting new book, Wade Rathke tells the story of this popular struggle against seemingly insurmountable odds, from the perspective of those at the heart of the fight to save New Orleans for its people.