Abstract

The Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) began as a membership-building project of the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO) in 1970, in Little Rock, Arkansas. ACORN developed a model of community organizing that worked one-on-one with people to build large membership organizations directed by their low-income, mainly female membership bases. The group has pursued a holistic view of community organizing and has advocated for living-wage legislation, affordable housing, fair lending, rape prevention, and day care and workfare worker organizing. In this paper we, try to focus on the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now.

Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now

Introduction

A Shift in Focus Community organizations are not what they used to be. No longer the strictly turf-oriented, hard-line confrontational instruments of citizen empowerment and municipal reform, community organizations have evolved out of the vague philosophy of simply "organizing ordinary people for power" to a highly sophisticated, broad-based plethora of organizational networks, replete with replicable organizational models, codified strategic and tactical rubrics, and complex staff-constituency relationships. Statewide community organizations have grown up in approximately thirty-eight states, while studies estimate that there may be as many as 8,000 neighborhood-based groups organized around issues such as tenants' rights, plant or school closings, and allocation of state and local government funds. The activities of community organizations take place on a number of levels and range from community-based economic development to hard-line electoral activity (Reese, 294).

Discussion

Exploring first the historical development of the organization between 1970 and 1979, the study amplifies ACORN's functional imperatives of expansion, penetration, and consolidation, which are the prerequisites for the organization's 1979-1982 efforts to project itself as a national political entity by waging a protracted struggle with the Democratic Party.

Examining the relationship of movement theory to practice, the study delineates the degree to which dominant social structure penetrates ACORN's social relations, as well as how the organization's practice accommodates or contradicts dominant social relations. Refocusing on the broader community organization movement, the study evaluates the significance, in theoretical terms, of community organizations as the instrumentalities that potentially defetishize the production and allocation of collective goods and validate oppositional behavior. Finally, the study assesses ACORN's conscious attempt to galvanize a social movement and suggests which social forces are most susceptible to the influence of a tightly organized national community organization.

History, how they raise money, founder, how it was organized

While there are over 8,000 local community organizations operating in fifty states, most of them are either modeled after or built directly by one of the four national community organizing networks: ACORN, Citizen Action, National People's Action, and the Industrial Areas Foundation. Each organizational type represents an instrumental response to the fiscal crisis as well as a conscious effort by each network to address questions of structure, tactics, constituency, infrastructure, and ideology. As the chart indicates, each of the four organizational networks has developed a different organizational form, as well as different financial and infrastructural resources.

Why, then, focus on ACORN? First, ACORN is the largest community organization, with 50,000 members ...