Just What Can We Say on ACORN’s Behalf?

Just What Can We Say on ACORN’s Behalf?

Post #6 – A look at ACORN’s good works.

The controversies that have engulfed ACORN in the past two years – the embezzlement and cover up, the allegations of voter fraud, and the hidden camera videotapes – have overshadowed the organization’s accomplishments over the past four decades.  The news media has not made much of an effort to step back and gain a balanced picture of this grassroots group.

“That’s what’s so tragic about what’s going on,” Amy Schur, formerly California ACORN’s chief organizer and now executive director of ACCE, told me when we spoke earlier this month.  She noted that there are few effective organizations working on behalf of low and moderate income people.

“Acorn is now well known, but what most Americans know about it is wrong, based on controversies manufactured by the group’s long-time enemies,” John Atlas and Peter Dreier suggest (”The Acorn Scandal Offers Key Lessons to All Charities,” Chronicle of Philanthropy, December 10, 2009).

What has ACORN accomplished?

ACORN has been highly effective at organizing families who possess neither wealth nor influence.  These folks join together to make better lives for themselves.  Often – perhaps most often – the focus of ACORN’s efforts is on the immediate neighborhood.  “ACORN’s primary work,” notes Barbara Osborn of Liberty Hill Foundation, “which takes place in low and moderate income neighborhoods, helps residents build organization and develop community leadership so that they can work effectively as a community to take on quality of life issues.”  Better lighting, repaved streets, revitalized parks, textbooks in their children’s schools – each of these issues might be a cause to rally around.

In December, Scott Gold reported in the Los Angeles Times (“A good move for South L.A. neighborhood,” December 22, 2009)  on a campaign that began 14 6 years ago with the concerns of a young immigrant from Jalisco, Mexico, a mother whose two daughters suffered from asthma, nose bleeds, and a variety of other respiratory problems.  When she started knocking on doors, she found that these ailments also afflicted other children in the neighborhood.  She suspected that the heavy metal plating factory across from the school was the problem, though officials assured her that it posed no health hazards.  (More recently, the company has been subject to fines and criminal prosecutions related to hazardous wastes, airborne pollutants, and illegal dumping.)

A decade and a half later, after this concerned parent joined forces with ACORN and eventually become president of her neighborhood chapter, the Times’ report suggests that a settlement may be near – with the factory moving into an industrial area.

ACORN wages more high profile battles as well – stretching beyond local neighborhoods, including successful efforts (in California and elsewhere) to raise state minimum wages and for cities to adopt living wage ordinances.  ACORN has won campaigns for affordable housing and against predatory lending practices and foreclosure scams.  And (of course) ACORN has registered more than 2 million voters in the last three election cycles.

Its successes on behalf of low and moderate income people – at the expense of banks, insurers, and polluting companies, among other powerful interests – is the reason it has generated so much opposition.  Any fair-minded assessment of ACORN must include acknowledgement of these successes.

While ACORN has been slandered by its fiercest critics – it has certainly stumbled.  A report by Scott Harshbarger, which was commissioned by ACORN and characterized as a whitewash by critics, paints a damning portrait of the organization.  My next post in this series highlights the Harshbarger report: The Harshbarger Report: ACORN’s Roadmap for Reform?

Previous posts in this series:

[July 10, 2010 update: This comment explains the correction, changing 14 years to 6, in the post above.]

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