Organizations  ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) What they do  National Urban League What they do  Rainbow Push Coalition What they do

ACORN: Historical Background With the election of a community organizer as president of the United States, the time is right to evaluate the current state of community organizing and the effectiveness of ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now). Since 2002, ACORN has been dramatically expanding and raising its national profile; it has also been weathering controversy over its voter registration campaigns and an internal financial scandal. The twelve chapters in this volume present the perspectives of insiders like founder Wade Rathke and leading outside practitioners and academics. The result is a thorough detailing of ACORN's founding and its changing strategies, including vivid accounts and analyses of its campaigns on the living wage, voter turnout, predatory lending, redlining, school reform, and community redevelopment, as well as a critical perspective on ACORN's place in the community organizing landscape. (Fisher 2009)

ACORN: Mission  Across the country ACORN has built partnerships with unions to pass living- wage laws, raise the minimum wage, fight for affordable housing, open job access for local residents, and other initiatives. His article highlights the wide variety of ways in which unions and community groups can partner. Kest also explains, from a community perspective, the potential hazards to labor-community coalitions (Kest 2003)

ACORN: Leadership  Steven Kest is executive director of the largest network of low-income neighborhood groups in the country--the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now. (Kest 2003)

ACORN and Community Development 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. The author tells the story of this popular struggle against seemingly intermountable odds, from the perspective of those at the heart of the fight to save New Orleans for its people. ( ACORN and the Rebuilding of New Orleans (Rathke 2008)

National Urban League: Historical Background A history of the Urban League that places it within the mainstream of African-American thought, this book shows the League as a major force for civil rights. Understanding the roots of the African- American search for equality, as the author demonstrates, is essential both to students of black history and to participants in the ongoing struggle for universal human rights. Correcting previous interpretations, Professor Moore contends that a number of individuals involved in forming the Urban League rose above the Washington-DuBois controversy, attending to the needs and aspirations of blacks already acculturated to urban life as well as those who arrived in cities without the skills to prosper in a modern, industrial, and increasingly complex society. The book starts by reviewing the changes--psychological, educational, political, social, and geographic --which American Negroes experienced between 1830 and 1910 in the context of similar (if less dramatic) changes affecting American whites. The record presented here shows that cooperation between the NUL and the NAACP has been the norm, despite occasional differences, and that the two organizations remain vibrant forces in the search for equality

National Urban League: Mission The mission of the Urban League movement is to enable African Americans to secure economic self-reliance, parity, power and civil rights.

National Urban League Leadership PRESIDENT AND CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER Marc H. Morial National Urban League John D. Hofmeister Founder and CEO Citizens for Affordable Energy

National Urban League and Community Development

Rainbow Push Coalition: Historical Background

Rainbow Push Coalition: Mission

Rainbow Push Coalition Leadership

Rainbow Push Coalition and Community Development

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Conclusion