‹ Our Work

Growing Civic Organizations

To hold people power, we need people’s institutions

Our communities are rich with talent, vision, passion, and drive. When we come together in shared struggle, we grow our leadership and our power.

Our Vision

We’re building institutions where people can come together with others to have a collective voice in all aspects of our lives.

At work, we form unions and worker centers to negotiate for better wages and respect from the boss. At home, we join tenant associations to push back on unfair rent hikes and insist landlords promptly make repairs. We have community organizations, transit-riders unions, youth groups, and other spaces of shared strength.

What We Face

In an economy that serves the few, those few must keep the many divided. Corporate elites and their political allies have waged multi-decade campaigns to prevent working people, BIPOC communities, renters, and debtors from coming together to take on white supremacy and corporate profiteering.

  • Since the 1950s, corporate interests have launched attack after attack on working people’s freedom to join together in unions. These attacks have driven down the share of US workers with the protections of a union: from nearly a third to just 10% today. The result: lower wages, more workplace injuries and deaths, and worsening inequality. This assault has particularly hurt Black and Brown people, who see the biggest boost in wages and job quality from organizing unions. 
  • Big landlord companies and private equity firms are increasingly buying our homes and apartment buildings, then cutting back on maintenance to pump up their profits. When tenants ask for crucial repairs or question huge rent hikes, the corporations respond with intimidation and eviction notices to break up renter organizing.
  • To keep oppressed communities divided, corporate-funded interest groups stoke dog-whistles about Black and Brown people, immigrants, and other marginalized peoples. These interest groups promote a zero-sum worldview, where gains for one community must come at the expense of another (all while corporate elites and investors extract from all the rest of us).
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Our Path Forward

To transform our cities and towns, we need to build multi-racial, community-centered, feminist bases of organized people. Our future depends not just on the policies we win but on the power we build along the way.

  • That starts with organizing: inviting people who have been excluded from decision-making to fight together for better jobs, affordable homes, and community needs.
  • As people step up, we help them develop as leaders. Our network has a deep commitment to strengthening the public leadership of women, gender-oppressed people, people of color, religious minorities, and immigrants so they can be fierce and effective advocates.
  • We must create spaces that can sustain organizing and nourish leadership for the long haul. Through durable organizations — reservoirs of wisdom, strength, and resilience — working people can exercise power in the public arena to advance our collective liberation.
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Ready to play to win?

Join other organizers, working people, renters, and local leaders in building the institutions our communities need to hold power: