Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF)

The Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF) is a network of more than 50 broad-based, multiethnic, interfaith organizations in primarily poor and low-income communities across the United States, Canada, and Europe. Its mission is to help ordinary citizens generate power to participate in the public arena in order to influence public and corporate sector decisions that impact the welfare of their neighborhoods and cities. The IAF model of community organizing brings together community institutions and their representative leaders to identify issues of mutual concern, and take collaborative action to improve their communities. Professional organizers, trained by IAF national or regional network staff, guide local IAF affiliate organizations in building and developing an agenda for change. The IAF model is based on the belief that politically marginalized people have the potential to develop skills and take action on their own behalf. IAF organizations thus focus intensively on educating members of their constituent institutions in politics, organizing, and communication skills so that these members can motivate and mobilize others to fight for needed changes in their communities. IAF groups have organized on a [Page 746]wide variety of issues from affordable housing to public education to living wages.

The IAF network grew out of the work of Saul Alinsky, who has been referred to as the father of community organizing. Alinsky applied labor organizing principles to a neighborhood setting and organized industrial workers and their families where they lived, in working-class neighborhoods in Chicago in the late 1930s. Alinsky founded the IAF in 1940 as a national organization dedicated to developing power among poor and working-class people to improve local social and economic conditions. He led the organization until his death in 1972. Alinsky's successor, Ed Chambers, worked under Alinsky in Chicago and Rochester, New York, and served as Director of the IAF Training Institute when it formed in 1969. Under Chambers's leadership, the IAF expanded its reach by including women in national leadership trainings, providing better wages to organizers, and recruiting neighborhood institutions, mainly churches and synagogues, to become members, rather than individuals. Religious institutions later became the primary focus of IAF's approach. This faith-based, institutional approach to organizing used religious values as a basis for motivating congregation members to take political action. The structure of the church provided a network of preexisting relationships, based on shared values, to facilitate mass mobilization of church members. Shared value commitments also helped connect individuals to IAF as a mechanism through which people of faith could take responsibility for rebuilding their communities.

Ernesto Cortes, Jr., is a well-known organizer who has played a central role in shaping the strategies and practices of IAF, particularly in the southwestern United States. A native of San Antonio, Cortes initiated Communities Organized for Public Service (COPS), the first Texas IAF organization in 1974. COPS mobilized faith-based institutions serving poor and working-class Mexican Americans to improve conditions in San Antonio's neglected south and westside neighborhoods. By the late 1970s, COPS had become a major political player in San Antonio, and Cortes emerged as a key leader in the expansion of IAF's work across Texas during the 1970s and 1980s. He later moved to East Los Angeles to organize the United Neighborhoods Organization, another IAF affiliate. Cortes continues to play a prominent role in the IAF as its Southwest Region Supervisor.

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