Organizing Nationally to Win Locally: Faith-Based Community Organizing’s New Frontier

Over the past few years faith-based organizing networks have broken onto the national organizing scene, adding grass-roots power and issue expertise to some of the biggest problems of the day. By Heidi J. Swarts

Community organizing faces a dilemma—and not just the recession. Its face-to-face communities put the “roots” in grassroots. Yet local organizing alone cannot address the national, even global sources of policies felt at the local level. Organizers are learning that to win locally, they have to fight nationally. ACORN has mounted national campaigns for years, with notable successes. This very success and visibility brought a bitter corollary, of course; its massive voter registration effort drew the wrath of conservative media and Republicans, suggesting that ACORN must have been doing something right (and, yes, a few things wrong). They weren’t alone. National People’s Action (NPA) led the early fights to win the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (1975) and Community Reinvestment Act (1977), which then became essential linchpins of future campaigns by ACORN, NPA, and faith-based organizations as well.

But no faith-based organizing network attempted to become a national player—until recently. Though some mounted limited national efforts well before 2008, over the past two years faith-based organizing has finally “gone national.”

The Challenges

Faith-based community organizations (FBCOs) face particular and significant challenges in shifting scale to national campaigns. A typical local FBCO is a federation of 15 to 30 or more member congregations (and sometimes schools, unions, and other groups). Each is legally independent, but usually a member of a national network, federations such as the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF), PICO National Network, Gamaliel Foundation, or Direct Action and Resource Training (DART) Center.

ACORN, by contrast, not only has neighborhood chapters, city affiliates, state organizations, and national offices—but, unlike the FBCO networks, it is one national organization with centralized authority located in the national staff and board. For years ACORN has also had specialized national staff in Washington, D.C., who work with Congress members and build alliances. While it can take months for each member church of an FBCO to agree on a citywide campaign or for a group of FBCOs to agree on a state-level campaign, centrally coordinated ACORN can turn on a dime.

Unlike ACORN, FBCOs are 501©3 nonprofit organizations made up of other 501©3—congregations. They cannot run or endorse candidates for office, although they can run nonpartisan issue campaigns. But more serious barriers to their going national have been their localist bias, inadequate resources, and decentralized, highly democratic authority structure. FBCOs often feel torn between their strength—deep, member-led local capacity—and national ambitions. They also often lack the capacity (number of affiliates and money) to realize those ambitions. ACORN developed brilliant strategies for mobilizing resources through contracts to provide services such as homebuyer counseling, screening, training, and recruiting those eligible for the Earned Income Tax Credit. Most FBCOs have relied on traditional foundation and denominational sources of funding, internal fundraisers, and congregational dues. When ACORN’s budget was close to $40 million, the PICO Network’s combined budget was only $18 million.

However, FBCOs have leapt over these hurdles. PICO and the Gamaliel Foundation have brought top leaders from all over the country together and brought them to Washington for lobbying, planning, rallies, and press conferences. In PICO’s case they have built relationships among national leaders through repeated Washington gatherings since 2002, culminating in a national steering committee. All of them have formed unprecedented coalitions and learned tactics from advocacy and interest groups while retaining their unique source of power: a mass base.

Local Experience on the Issues

Deep local knowledge of how national issues affect citizens is one advantage community organizations have that Washington advocacy groups lack. Local campaigns provide issue expertise and credibility. The Gamaliel Foundation’s St. Louis area affiliates know intimately how sprawl and congestion-producing highways deprive mass transit of funding. They fought local highway expansion and campaigned to maintain roads and improve safety. Also, members know the need not for McJobs, but skilled jobs with benefits. This deep local experience led Gamaliel and allies to advocate for features in the SAFETY-LU (the 2005 federal transportation reauthorization bill) that authorized 30 percent of jobs funding for local low-income, minority, and women workers. “The only reason we would do a national campaign is if we have good capacity of local groups working on that issue,” explains Gamaliel national policy director Laura Barrett.

“Transportation is important in the regional equity work, which we have a lot of experience working on.” Gamaliel’s metro St. Louis groups now lead the national Transportation Equity Network (TEN).

The PICO National Network’s first fully national campaign seeks health care reform with a high affordability standard. PICO has wide experience in health campaigns. In 2000, in partnership with a labor think tank, San Jose PACT, a PICO local, won a set of programs guaranteeing health care for all children in Santa Clara County. Other PICO locals replicated the tactic, which used state tobacco settlement funds. PICO California, with 19 affiliates, began to move on health care issues in Sacramento when it was clear that local solutions required state funding and programs. Only when California’s federal S-CHIP funding for children’s health was in jeopardy did PICO launch a national campaign to fully fund S-CHIP. One PICO staffer explained, “We would have never worked on kids’ health care if we hadn’t done the Santa Clara County campaign.” S-CHIP languished during the Bush administration, but was one of the first bills President Obama signed. At the signing, PICO’s leadership was recognized: grassroots leaders were seated with Michelle Obama, and PICO pastors and staff were present. Local knowledge of needs, desirable program features, and experience with opponents gives FBCOs issue expertise and powerful personal narratives to use in national venues.

Simultaneous Local, State, and National Campaigns

Social scientist Theda Skocpol has written about the decline of federally organized veterans, fraternal, and civic organizations with mass memberships. She argues that, unlike Washington-based “checkbook membership” organizations, the mass bases of organizations like these—mobilized through local, state, and national offices so they could target government at all three levels—leveraged enough power to make policies such as the GI Bill more generous and inclusive. While FBCOs, ACORN, and others cannot boast the base of these “old-fashioned” groups, they are developing a similar federal structure. They align campaigns so that each level energizes the others. One common tactic is holding simultaneous local actions on the same issue.

The synergistic relationship of local to national strategy is illustrated by a PICO staffer’s comments about its Denver local, MOP (Metropolitan Organizations for People):

Organizations that have big capacity like MOP in Denver can do a lot at once. It has a budget of $600,000 to $700,000, a staff of 8 to 10 people, a paid lobbyist at the state level, strong political relationships with the mayor and governor, and a strong internal capacity and relational network. They are seen as the strongest civic organization in Denver. They played a big role on S-CHIP: their Congress member was vice-chair of Energy and Commerce [a committee responsible for health care] A lot of the work is local, I guess that’s the lesson.

Organizational Capacity and Resources

Deep and broad infrastructure—relationships, active locals, organizers, effective leaders, allies, and funding—produce organizational capacity. Adequate resources are critical. PICO, Gamaliel, and the IAF have different organizational capacities available for national organizing.

PICO Network staff had long wanted to be active nationally, and after 2000 they felt ready to start bringing leaders together in Washington, D.C. PICO’s director, Scott Reed explains, “Devolution for years allowed us to pay attention to local remedies because there were local resources to respond.” But federal budget cuts and the economic recession of 2000, when monies from Washington to the states dried up, made targeting states rather pointless. To win locally now might require organizing nationally. The first national gathering of PICO leaders in 2002 developed into PICO’s national New Voices Campaign. At first, seasoned leaders from PICO locals met several times a year in Washington to build relationships, compare issues, and visit elected representatives. Its first national campaign was federal funding for S-CHIP (children’s health care funding), which President Obama signed. Obama’s election opened the window of opportunity for all community organizations. By then, PICO New Voices had united around the goal of national health care reform and allied itself with major reform advocates including the SEIU, AARP, the American Cancer Society, and Community Catalyst, which has coordinated state-based health care advocacy groups for over a decade.

To ensure a continuous national presence, PICO opened a national office next to the Capitol and added four full-time Washington staff and ten more national staff to its 150 organizers. These include directors of national policy, communications, and outreach to affiliates, plus a health care reform campaign director. PICO’s annual budget jumped from $18 million to $28 million. The New Voices leaders are now developing into a national steering committee and meeting every couple of months in Washington. Their health care reform tactics include regular lobbying of representatives by leaders, simultaneous events by PICO locals, radio ads, and telephone lobbying using a PICO automated phone number that tracks volume of calls and directs callers successively to their representative and senators. Having full-time national staff in Washington develops a presence, set of networks, and visibility for PICO that is usually reserved for single-issue interest groups.

Gamaliel’s local experience with transportation infrastructure positioned it to lead a national transportation policy lobby. In 2005, affiliates’ long working relationships with their national legislators paid off when they won the support of senators Christopher Bond (R-MO) and Barack Obama (D-IL). The senators championed the amendment that provided for low-income apprenticeships in transportation construction. On June 29, 2009, Gamaliel took a new step and brought 550 members to Washington. Members lobbied 80 legislators on health care, immigration reform, and jobs programs and protested the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s investment of $100 million to block public health care. Gamaliel, however, does not yet have as much capacity (staff, budget, and number of long-lived locals with many experienced leaders) to establish the ongoing Washington presence that PICO has.

Strategic Capacity, Including Flexibility and Openness to New Tactics and Alliances

The IAF is a unique case: although a national organization, its four regional groups do not work together, so it would seem unable to conduct coordinated national organizing. However, the IAF’s history, achievements, and seasoned senior staff may enable one IAF region to do national-level work. The IAF’s Metro East division has begun an experiment not only in national but international organizing that kicked off in summer 2009. Though a relatively small group, it seized a historic opportunity and identifed powerful sources of leverage and may potentially be able to use them to accomplish multiple and overlapping goals. Its success remains to be seen.

The Metro East IAF, which spans the eastern corridor from Washington, D.C., to Boston, with 17 locals, has joined its 3 IAF affiliates in the United Kingdom, which have been organized for twenty years, on a “10 Percent Is Enough” anti-usury campaign. According to organizer Arnie Graf, “When the economic crisis hit and we were doing house meetings, we got stories about foreclosure, layoffs, their budget squeeze. The whole issue of debt came up, through payday loans, skyrocketing credit card rates, “rapid refund” loans on tax returns, and auto loans that ultimately required 660 percent interest.” A common theme was usury—exploitive interest rates.

The 10 Percent Is Enough campaign is strategically shrewd because it is relevant internationally. The issue has historical and cross-cultural resonance: the United States had usury laws from its founding until 1980, usury is condemned throughout the Bible, and any interest is forbidden by Muslim banks. (IAF Metro East is recruiting many Muslim mosques.)

The campaign has near-endless ways to leverage organized money. It can demand that “bailout banks” cease financing usurious lenders and restrict their credit card interest rates. Religious denominations can move their money into low-interest credit unions or banks. Campaigners can demand that the people’s budgets—state, city, and county—not pay excessive interest rates.
Potential allies extend beyond the usual suspects to include the retail sector which itself pays a fee for every credit card transaction. 7-11 stores are already running a consumer campaign to lower credit card fees 7-11 must pay, arguing that they are passed on to the consumer.

A U.K.-U.S. campaign highlights the multinational nature of banks as corporations. The campaign will target the Bank of Scotland, which owns Citizens Bank and others in the United States.

As ACORN and other FBCOs have done, the 17 Metro-East IAF affiliates held decentralized actions on one multinational firm (Bank of America) at the same time, demonstrating their breadth and unity.

Organizing costs are low, since the Metro-East locals are in one region: members can use cars, buses, or trains to come together.

Legislators have expressed interest in this as a potential campaign issue. Senator Bernie Sanders got 33 votes for a bill to cap interest rates at 15 percent, and support is growing. The “10 Percent Is Enough” campaign is still in the research phase, and doesn’t plan to compete with health care, a consumer protection agency, or immigration reform on the legislative agenda. Meanwhile, that allows time for a movement to develop. Graf acknowledges that if the campaign targets Congress, that Metro-East IAF, like PICO, would mount a significant shift in scale.

Unprecedented Alliances

As FBCOs go national, they are also forming new alliances. As a step toward cooperation, ACORN and PICO directors in the same cities agreed to meet with each other in 20032004, but at the time a PICO staffer commented off-handedly, “We’ll never get to a point where we’re going to work together.” Five years later, on July 27, 2009, I watched PICO and ACORN collaborate on their first event in 37 years of coexistence: a press conference launching Americans for Financial Reform, where both PICO and ACORN members shared personal stories of financial disaster. Tragically for movement-building, ACORN was severely harmed by the now-infamous secret videos by right-wing activists that captured a few Baltimore ACORN staffers giving advice on how to break the law.

Through numerous alliances, PICO national organizing director Gordon Whitman explains, “You learn these are big, complex coalitional fights. You learn your value. We have on-the-ground local experience, the ability to move large numbers of people.”

The Risk and the Reward

PICO and IAF top organizers repeatedly express fears that the all-consuming (and glamorous) lure of national organizing could drain resources from FBCO’s traditional strengths: developing leaders, retaining local organizing depth, and delivering on local issues. This is partly a financial issue: national organizing of this style requires having the funds to hire enough local and national organizers.

I propose that it is also a “framing” challenge. National organizing delivers on local issues: otherwise, FBCOs, ACORN, NPA, and others would not have pursued it. It’s up to organizers and leaders to keep making the links clear.

Heidi J. Swarts is an assistant profes- sor of political science at Rutgers University, Newark, and the author of Organizing Urban America: Secular and Faith-Based Progressive Movements.

Published by the National Housing Institute