Books | Articles | Essays
Collective Mourning, Collective Action
By Joe Rubio
A visit to the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute becomes a lens for our collective grief and collective power to organize. Drawing on Walter Brueggemann and the story of Lazarus, this reflection argues that lament is an act of bold faith that demands a communal response. From a Phoenix immigration raid to organizing efforts in Los Angeles and Chicago, this piece by organizer and IAF national co-director Joe Rubio shows how public grief can confront power and make change possible.
The Oxford Handbook of Populism & and Inclusive Populism
In this review of two books on populism, Nick Spencer opens with the question: who are "the people?" Western countries are in a muddle about who "the people" are, what they want, and who speaks for them. Spencer explores community organizing as a coherent response to that dilemma.
Core Organizing Texts
Dry Bones Rattling: Community Building to Revitalize American Democracy
By Mark Warren
Dry Bones Rattling looks at how America’s communities can rebuild their social capital while encouraging democratic participation that includes people of all races. It focuses on the Industrial Areas Foundation network in Texas and the Southwest, as a national model for renewing democratic life in inner cities and elsewhere. Faith leaders from poor communities of color join with counterparts from wealthier ones to form organizations strong enough to build affordable housing, set up job-training programs, strengthen schools, expand public services, and make neighborhoods safer.
Catholic
A Call to Faith-Filled Action: Pope Leo's New Encyclical
By Angus Ritchie
Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, calls Christians to rebuild the common good in an age of artificial intelligence. Contrasting the pride of Babel with Nehemiah’s shared labor and the Spirit of Pentecost, this reflection shows how community organizing offers a faith-rooted path from listening to concrete action, holding states and markets to account while purifying the Church’s own heart. The article mentions the Industrial Areas Foundation by name, and well as the West Southwest Industrial Areas Foundation's modern founder, Ernesto Cortés Jr.
Books | Articles | Essays
The Complex Task of the Parish
By Rev. Philip Murnion
Pastoral Life Center Director Msgr. Phillip Murnion asserts that truly authentic parishes keep Catholics from retreating into privatized religion, by preparing and facilitating engagement with public life, honest reflection on culture, mutual support, and shared identity. He argues that the role of the parish is to act as a mediating community that bridges a person's private spiritual life with their public, social responsibilities. He points to COPS in San Antonio, which launched the modern West Southwest IAF, as a real-world example of church life and community organizing working together effectively.
Books | Articles | Essays
Upon This Rock: The Miracles of a Black Church
By Samuel G. Freedman
The story of the ministry of Rev. Johnny Ray Youngblood at St. Paul Community Baptist Church in East Brooklyn, a ministry built on radical honesty and a theology of a forgiving, present-tense God (in contrast to a "wait for the promised land" kind of faith). Youngblood's community organizing through the IAF translated into concrete institution-building: bringing black men back into the church; a culture of tithing to fund a church school; and revitalization of neighborhood businesses in what was at the time one of the country's most forsaken inner-city neighborhoods.
Legacy Readings
Reweaving the Social Fabric
By Ernesto Cortes Jr.
Published in Kettering Review, Summer 1996 — and in Boston Review, 1994, "Reweaving the Social Fabric" is an account by Ernesto Cortés Jr.' of how the IAF's Communities Organized for Public Service (COPS) rebuilds civic and political power in San Antonio by restitching relationships across churches, schools, and neighborhoods, embodying his own oft-repeated organizing principle that "all organizing is re-organizing." Reweaving the Social Fabric, Kettering Review, Summer 1996.
Core Organizing Texts
Hope Dies Last: Keeping the Faith in Difficult Times
By Studs Terkel
In his book, Hope Dies Last, renowned oral historian Studs Terkel draws on interviews with organizers, workers, immigrants, political activists, and ordinary Americans to illustrate how people face and respond to difficult times while holding onto hope. Said former IAF National Director Ed Chambers: “I realized that I got my energy for this work from other people, so the self must stay in connection with others, new others, others that have more talent and more vision and more power than you have.” In short -- "you’ve got to be in relationship with real people.”
Core Organizing Texts
Blessed are the Organized
By Jeffrey Stout
Where is American democracy alive today? Jeffrey Stout finds it in the congregations, unions, and neighborhood associations of broad-based community organizing, especially the network built by the Industrial Areas Foundation. Following organizers as they train leaders, hold public officials accountable, and win concrete victories, he shows how citizens of different faiths and none can build real power together. Part ethnography and part philosophical argument, the book sees democracy not as a procedure but as a living tradition of ethical practice, and it asks what religious and secular Americans owe one another in it.
Core Organizing Texts
Cold Anger: A Story of Faith and Power Politics
By Mary Beth Rogers
Cold Anger: A Story of Faith and Power Politics chronicles Ernesto Cortés Jr. and the Industrial Areas Foundation's broader network of church-based organizing — from San Antonio to the Rio Grande Valley, Los Angeles, and beyond. Mary Beth Rogers, former campaign manager and chief of staff to Texas Governor Ann Richards, describes the establishment of the Southwest IAF as "the story of a new kind of intervention in politics, in which poor people incorporate their religious values into a struggle for power and visibility." Cold Anger is a page-turner about transforming the slow burn of injustice into a disciplined, relational form of political power that working-class communities can wield.
Books | Articles | Essays
Faith, Charity and Justice
By Ernesto Cortes Jr.
In "Faith, Charity and Justice," Ernesto Cortés Jr. argues that churches must move beyond charity toward justice, insisting that "what is owed in justice should never be given in charity." He points to the IAF's Southwest labor-market intermediaries as proof that organized communities of faith can build lasting economic power rather than just meeting immediate needs.
Case Studies
Resurrecting Democracy: Faith, Citizenship and the Politics of Common Life
By Luke Bretherton
British theologian Luke Bretherton discusses broad-based community organizing as a distinctive form of democratic politics. He examines success stories from IAF community organizing efforts through the lens of faith.
