Ohio Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF)
Ari Lipman (Faith Vote Columbus): 617-852-6405, ari.lipman@gmail.com
Laura Rios (Reclaim Lorain): 440-821-7135, lrios2@yahoo.com
Bishop C. Joseph Sprague (Vote Dayton): 740-506-1791, cjosephsprague@sbcglobal.net
Jonathan Lange (IAF National Staff): 443-745-3402, langeiaf@hotmail.com
The Industrial Areas Foundation was founded in 1940 by Saul Alinsky, considered by many to be the patriarch of modern community organizing.
The IAF has built 56 broad-based coalitions of religious congregations, neighborhood associations, civic groups, and labor unions in 21 states, DC, Canada, Germany, and the United Kingdom.
IAF accomplishments include the founding of the national living wage movement in Baltimore, MD, the construction of over 3000 affordable Nehemiah Homes in East Brooklyn, New York, the creation of Alliance Schools throughout Texas, and the adoption of universal health care in Massachusetts.
In the process of experimenting with ways to transform citizen leadership into real political power, the IAF has become a leading innovator in non-partisan voter mobilization.
We believe that people in poor communities and disenfranchised neighborhoods have just as great a capacity and appetite for civic participation and voting as do their more affluent counterparts if… if elections are made meaningful by candidates who address their primary self-interests, and if they are invited into a process that values their time, intelligence, skill, and interests.
In November 2004, a group of 15 experienced IAF organizers took 10 days of vacation time to initiate a voter mobilization experiment in East Cleveland, Ohio at the invitation of AFSCME. East Cleveland, the poorest suburb of the poorest city in the nation, had one of Ohio’s lowest voter participation rates.
Our organizers knocked on every door in the city, not just with the intention of reminding people to vote, but for the purpose of recruiting volunteers to turn out their neighbors on election day. All told, the 15 organizers recruited 150 neighborhood volunteers to run a sophisticated, neighborhood-based get-out-the-vote effort on Election Day. With this strategy, rooted in the belief that East Cleveland residents would volunteer their civic energy if properly invited, in just 10 days IAF volunteers were able to double voter turnout – from 5,000 in 2002 up to 10,000 in 2004, for a total voter turnout rate of approximately 66%. This increase in turnout was literally four times greater than anywhere else in Cuyahoga County.
In 2006, the IAF chose to focus on building this type of volunteer organization in four cities (Columbus, Dayton, East Cleveland, and Lorain) where we thought we could have the most impact, and could best begin the multi-year process of training hundreds of local volunteers to do each election cycle what our professional organizers did in 2004.
We built our strategy on our core beliefs and our experience building broad-based political organizations: let the citizens talk about the issues affecting their life, and listen. In each city we held hundreds of discussions in the form of small “house meetings”. From these discussions, local church, union, and neighborhood leaders formed issue agendas to present to the candidates for Ohio state-wide office. We met with the candidates in small groups, briefed them on the agendas, and invited them to political rallies in Dayton, Columbus, and Lorain. In total, over 1,400 leaders at three rallies heard political candidates offer yes or no answers to the specific proposals they generated in their house meetings. At each of these rallies, the IAF recruited hundreds of volunteers to walk low performing precincts and call infrequent voters in their respective cities. We used state-of-the-art walk lists and trained hundreds of volunteers on GOTV methods. On Election Day 2006, we put hundreds of people on the streets and in telephone banks. We protected the right to vote on Election Day and did a final neighborhood turnout push.
Though evaluation of our 2006 campaign is ongoing, we can point to the following concrete results:
Three strong and ongoing organizing committees – rooted in established institutions including religious congregations, union locals, and neighborhood associations – in Dayton, Lorain, and Columbus (the East Cleveland campaign was by necessity once again a ringer campaign).
An infrastructure of hundreds of volunteers in each city, organized by church/union/neighborhood association, who enjoyed the campaign, are in continuous contact with the IAF and our leaders in their organizations, and want to expand their efforts in 2008.
Increased voter turnout in all wards targeted by the IAF campaigns, with the largest gains posted in those wards worked the hardest by our campaign volunteers. Our clearest results were in Lorain, where our targeted wards saw a 57% increase in voter turnout over 2002 results.
Strong commitments on meaningful local issues made to those leaders by Governor Ted Strickland, Senator Sherrod Brown, Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner, and 13th District Congresswoman Betty Sutton, which communicate to our volunteers the relationship between voting and meaningful change.
Building on the work of 2004 and 2006, the IAF will organize in Ohio in 2008. We intend to organize significant volunteer-based voter mobilization efforts in selected cities aimed at increasing voter turnout by 50,000 statewide, and in doing so, reframe the debate of the election to include urban, industrial, and poverty issues.
Two distinct but related goals propel our 2008 campaign proposals:
The IAF wants to inject issues of poverty, blight, and industrial job loss into the presidential election. In many ways Ohio is the poster child for these issues affecting the entire nation.
We want to demonstrate the unique effects of institutionally-based, voluntary efforts to increase voter turnout in low-performing urban areas.
In order to meet these objectives in 2008, the IAF must begin ramping up its efforts in 2007. We have established the following ambitious organizing calendar:
Hire staff
Develop committees in new cities and towns
Regional accountability sessions with elected officials.
Begin development of national platform for 2008 elections
Practice GOTV effort in municipal elections to train volunteers
Begin training workshops for volunteers
Ratify national platform
Extensive training workshops: voter registration and mobilization
Door-to-door voter registration campaign in targeted neighborhoods
Preparation for national platform action late summer: state-wide action with major-party presidential candidates at which we seek their endorsement of our national platform.
Every weekend from September through Election Day: neighborhood walks and phone banks.
November 4, 2008: Election Day GOTV with over 1000 trained local volunteers state-wide.
Ohio IAF has arranged to have our work evaluated by Dr. Donald Green and Dr. Alan Gerber of Yale University, the nation’s leading experts on documenting effective voter mobilization strategies.