Planting ACORNs - a different approach to community activism

As community activists, involved in our community councils or tenants and residents associations, there is always that sense that we could be doing more. Wouldnt it be great if we were involved in a community organisation that has 500,000 members, and was credited with re-distributing tens of billions of pounds from big business and the state to low income people? Sounds impossible! But this is exactly what one community organisation, called the Association of Community Organisations for Reform Now (ACORN) has achieved in the United States.

Community Council’s (CC’s) and Tenants and Residents Associations (TRA’s) in the UK share some similarities with groups like ACORN, and so comparisons are very relevant. They are all geographically based groups, that deal with many issues, and people from many different backgrounds. They are what the founder of ACORN calls ‘majority constituency’ groups, not focused on a single issue campaign or a specific demographic. They would often be campaigning on similar issues such as housing and service provision. There are lots of differences in style and structure though, and it is these differences which really make for an organisation with more vitality, and one which can have those impressive achievements.

Reading about ACORN and speaking to its founder, Wade Rathke, over the last few months has greatly impressed me, and encouraged me to wonder what I can borrow from the way they organise to help me with my work in the local tenants and residents group which I chair, or with the city wide private tenants group which I am the secretary of. What can we learn about ACORN which could help us achieve more in our communities?

One of the main differences between ACORN and our community organisations is membership and finance. Our organisations usually have a symbolic membership, where communities or streets are covered by a group, but not in any formal or concrete way, and they can be pretty unrepresentative. People do not opt-in to become members – they are members by default. This is in contrast to ACORN which has a formal membership structure, and which only represents people who sign up and pay ten or twenty dollars a month. 

They are also mainly funded by their members dues, and from some donations and grants as well. Being funded largely by their membership seems very important, it gives a great amount of independence from external sources of funding, be it Local Authorities in the case of TRA’s, or foundations in the case of single issue campaigning groups. For ACORN, it also seems to give members a greater sense of ownership over an organisation and encourage a sense of belonging to it, something which can be lacking in other community organisations. Their formal membership enables a very democratic organisation, that is led by its members, through voting, at a local level, city level, and ultimately deciding policy on the national level.

It also allows for progress to be more objectively measured. You can see how well connected you are to your community in terms of how many people join up and pay their dues. It means that a group is far more responsive to the needs of its members – if it isn’t doing what people want then people leave and its funding drops. This is quite unlike CC’s and TRA’s who are often funded by local authority grants, and can be quite un-responsive to their communities.

ACORN branches always do extensive door knocking in the areas they operate in, and in fact, this door knocking approach could be said to be the cornerstone of their organisational model. Through these regular door-to-door interviews they find out what the most widely-felt and deeply-felt issues are, and recruit new people into their organisation. This means that there is a greater independence to campaign on the issues that members choose, unlike TRA’s and CC’s which are usually involved in community planning/tenant participation structures which are often very much led by Council agendas and priorities, leaving little time and energy for independent campaigning. In most community organisations the issues picked to campaign on are usually picked on the basis of whoever turns up to meetings, and only occasionally involve door-to-door consultations. 

Because of this emphasis on door knocking to find the best issues, ACORN branches have much more participatory style, involving their members in planning the campaigns, in a more exciting and empowering process. This approach does seem to counter the widespread apathy that tenants groups generally report. There is a greater emphasis on conflict, mobilising members, and being visible with more effective use of the media. ACORN groups will often use direct action in their campaigns, sometimes protests, publicity stunts and other more disruptive actions like office occupations.

In order to sustain this kind of activity, they employ community organisers, who are paid from the members dues. These organisers assist members with developing their skills to run ACORN branches, do door-knocking, and run effective and strategic campaigns. These campaigns are based on ACORN’s extensive knowledge of running such campaigns, and they tend to focus on their members material self-interests, and aim to have visible results.

One criticism of ACORN might be that you are better working within the system, than from the outside. However, ACORN tends to do both, employing antagonistic tactics to increase its influence, to get a seat at the table, and to show they mean business when they negotiate with decision-makers. The partnership approach that is almost fundamental to many community organisations in the UK certainly doesn’t give us much influence beyond what the city councils grant us in their community planning structures.

With their antagonistic and participatory style, ACORN branches are involved in local campaigns that we would find familiar, such as getting local parks cleaned up, or improving local authority service provision. Other victories have been living wage campaigns, which ensure their low income members get to take home more money at the end of the month. Due to the size of the organisation they have been capable of impressive coordinated national campaigns, for example winning concessions from banks involved in predatory lending. The campaigns they pick tend to have very visible gains for its members, and often more money in their pockets. One study estimated that from 1994 to 2004 ACORN redistributed $15 billion dollars to low income families.

For example, in a national campaign against predatory lending, ACORN picketed around 50 offices of a big financial services company, H&R Block, on two occasions. This encouraged the company to negotiation, and ACORN won substantial concessions, including funding to go door-to-door encouraging low income working families to take up benefits that they were entitled to, like working tax credits, and money for ACORN’s financial advice programmes.

The demographics are also pretty different. While community organisations in the UK tend to struggle to have ethnic minorities and younger people involved, and are largely older or retired people, ACORN groups tend to be more representative. There are more people of working age, families, and very diverse ethnically, with large numbers of non-white people involved. This is certainly due to the more involving style of campaigning that they employ, the door knocking and the effort to ensure the issues picked are those which affect large numbers of people in a strong way.

One issue that must be mentioned is the collapse of ACORN in the USA. Having grown to 500,000 members and re-distributing billions of dollars from big business and the state to low income people it became the target of the right wing in the USA, who resented its growing influence. There isn’t room to go into it here, but several spurious allegations were championed by the right wing media, leading to it losing allies and funding.

It is down but not out, dozens of its local branches, affiliates and programmes still exist in the USA, and the living wage laws they helped win still benefit millions of people. There is also now an ACORN international which has chapters in countries around the world including Canada, Peru, India, Czech Republic and Italy. Canada ACORN is a good example, having grown rapidly to 45,000 members and is active on the living wage, payday lending and healthy homes.

Our community organisations in the UK could learn a great deal from ACORN, and I believe that we should borrow as much as possible from their model of organising to make our community organisations more relevant and powerful. Most importantly we should work towards creating an ACORN-like organisation here in the UK.

Further reading:   

For more on the ACORN organising model, you can read one of their training manuals - http://chieforganizer.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/ACORN-Organizing-Model.pdf
There is an excellent book written by John Atlas, on the history and methodology of ACORN - http://www.scribd.com/doc/57787950/Seeds-of-Change-The-Story-of-ACORN-America-s-Most-Controversial-Antipoverty-Community-Organizing-Group  
Another excellent book about ACORN, ‘The People Shall Rule’ – http://www.scribd.com/doc/57783977/The-People-Shall-Rule-ACORN-Community-Organizing-and-the-Struggle-for-Economic-Justice    - For an overview about what ‘community organizing’ is compared to other types of activity in the community, this article is excellent - http://comm-org.wisc.edu/papers97/beckwith.htm  
There isnt space to cover the reasons for the problems with the tenants movement, which are identified above. Essentially housing policy since the 80’s including right to buy and stock transfer has led to its decline as a social movement. For more information: http://www.criticalplace.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/Proud_to_be_a_Tenant_20121.pdf , an article written by Sarah Glynn on the tenants’ movement http://www.sarahglynn.net/The%20Tenants’%20Movement.html and Kim McKee on ‘The ‘responsible’ tenant and the problem of apathy’, http://eprints.gla.ac.uk/6098/1/6098.pdf