Industrial Areas Foundation
| Founded | May 25, 1940 |
|---|---|
| Founders | Saul David Alinsky, Marshal Field, Bishop Sheil Lewis, Kathryn Lewis |
| 36-2334627 | |
| Legal status | 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization |
| Headquarters | Chicago, Illinois |
| Georgianna Gleason | |
| Ernest Cortes Jr. | |
| Michael Gecan | |
|
Revenue (2014)
|
$556,507 |
| Expenses (2014) | $673,850 |
|
Employees (2014)
|
3 |
| Mission | To build organizations whose primary purpose is power—the ability to act—and whose chief product is social change. They continue to practice what the founding fathers preached: the ongoing attempt to make life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness everyday realities for more and more Americans. |
| Website | www |
The Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF) is a national community organizing network established in 1940 by Saul Alinsky, Roman Catholic Bishop Bernard James Sheil and businessman and founder of the Chicago Sun-Times, Marshall Field III. The IAF partners with religious congregations and civic organizations at the local level to help them build organizations of organizations, referred to as broad-based organizations by the Industrial Areas Foundation, with the purpose of strengthening citizen leadership, developing trust across a community's dividing lines and taking action on issues identified by local community leaders.
The Industrial Areas Foundation consists of 65 affiliates in the US, Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany and Australia, with the US projects organized into two regions, West / Southwest IAF and Metro IAF. IAF provides training, consultation and organizers for its affiliated organizations.
The Industrial Areas Foundation does not provide direct services, but through its organizing has created notable entities for workforce development (Project QUEST, Capital IDEA, Project IOWA, VIDA, ARRIBA, NOVA, Skills Quest, Capital IDEA - Houston, AZ Career Pathways and JobPath), healthcare (Common Ground Healthcare), and housing development for working- and middle-class families (Nehemiah Project in East Brooklyn and The Road Home Program in New Orleans). In 1994, the IAF organization in Baltimore designed and passed the first living wage bill in the US, and since then IAF organizations across the country have won changes including municipal living wage policies for public sector workers and living wage requirements for tax abatements or economic incentives, that have raised the wages of millions of workers.
Alinsky's first organizing project was the Back of the Yards Neighborhood Council, founded in 1939 as the Packinghouse Workers union was organizing Chicago's meatpacking industry. Based on his work with Back of the Yards, Alinsky laid out his vision for "People's Organizations" in his book Reveille for Radicals in 1946. After World War II Alinsky met Fred Ross in California, and in 1949 agreed to back his plan to organize the Community Service Organization in Mexican-American communities. Ross introduced house-meetings as an organizing technique, and built a network of 30 CSOs in California with energetic young organizers Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta.
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Wikipedia