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The A2 Times
A2 Members Get Organized in New Orleans
by Stewart Sinclair

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A2 Members Gather with ACORN for a group photo at the first ACORN/A2 Organizing School Training in New Orleans. Photo: A2

I exited the elevator to the third floor of the New Orleans Healing Center and found Wade Rathke standing outside a locked door.
“You the guy with the key?” he asked.
“No, I’m the guy from A2.”

Rathke, who founded ACORN (the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) in the 1970s, didn’t waste words as he phoned his wife Beth.
“Locked out. No tables, chairs, nobody here.”

This was the first training ACORN would be conducting with Anthropocene Alliance. We planned six of them in 2024 to introduce A2 members from the Gulf Coast, East Coast and Great Lakes regions to the basics of community organizing. Being locked out of the meeting room was an inauspicious start.

ACORN has been training community organizers in the U.S. and around the world for more than five decades. Rathke took what he learned from his formative years organizing against Vietnam and for welfare rights, and developed a “conflict model” aligned with the principles of Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals. Only where Alinsky targeted the highly educated middle-class that typified the ranks of professional organizers, Rathke sought to build “an organization based on, built on and committed to the lives of poor people.” In the 1980s, ACORN moved 60,000 families into abandoned homes in Philadelphia, Boston, and other cities around the country. After Hurricane Katrina, ACORN gutted houses and helped thousands of families return to the Lower Ninth Ward. At its peak in 2005, ACORN had 250,000 members in thirty-eight states. During the 2008 presidential campaign, they registered 1.3 million people to vote, many of them poor and Black. That made ACORN a lot of conservative enemies [[link removed]] .

“Once you organize people around something as commonly agreed upon as pollution, then an organized people is on the move.”

The partnership between A2 and ACORN is an attempt to initiate what A2’s co-founder Stephen Eisenman [[link removed]] calls a “relentless and skillful organizing of grassroots, working-class communities impacted by climate change and environmental abuse.” Environmental issues like flooding, toxic waste, wildfires and droughts have brought more than 270 member groups across 42 states to Anthropocene Alliance. The hope is that these trainings will lead to organized efforts to mitigate climate change and help communities adapt to its inevitable impacts. As Alinsky wrote, “Once you organize people around something as commonly agreed upon as pollution, then an organized people is on the move.”

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Photo from an ACORN Squatter’s Rights housing campaign. Source: ACORN International [[link removed]]

The Healing Center in the Seventh Ward, with its food co-op, art galleries and community garden, seemed ideal for an ACORN training—if we could get in. Fortunately, a custodian arrived with the keys, but he paused at the door.

“Wrong room,” he said, before escorting us to a small blue room on the second floor, stocked with tables and chairs. Soon the space was ready, with coffee and king cake (a special favorite in New Orleans) just in time for the first attendees. They trickled in until all the seats were filled. In total, twenty-three people from 17 member organizations showed up from Louisiana, Mississippi, Texas and Arkansas. They represented groups confronting blight, super-fund site contamination, and food deserts. Robyn Thiggpen, who came from Sulphur, Louisiana, has been fighting liquid natural gas (LNG) export terminals in Lake Charles. “I come from a small low-income neighborhood and there’s major issues with our water, and that all stems back to polluting industries.” Everyone I spoke to had a story, and they all seemed eager to develop their skills as organizers, and network with people driven to enact change.

Reverend Richard Bell opened the session with a prayer. Then Rathke took the reins. His booming voice and inexhaustible reserve of folksy aphorisms illustrated what his colleagues referred to as his “cowboy shtick” in The Organizer , [[link removed]] a documentary about Rathke and ACORN. I briefly pondered Alinsky’s distinction between “revealing flashes of arrogance, vanity, [and] impatience,” and the organizer’s ego, which “must be so all pervading that the personality of the organizer is contagious, that it converts the people from despair to defiance, creating a mass ego.”

As the day proceeded, I saw Rathke in that latter light. He seemed singularly and sincerely driven by his work. Those who knew him trusted him. One attendee, Kevin Holloway of ACO (Arkansas Community Organization), drove over four-hundred miles from Little Rock because “anything Wade’s involved in is going to be something good.” Alongside exercises in recruiting dues-paying members into a movement, or planning anti-flooding campaigns, I witnessed the soft work of building relationships, and I observed how the brash “cowboy” offered people a sense of empowerment and purpose.

At the end of the day, Valerie Jefferson from Women of Action stood up to emphasize how A2 and ACORN had been there for her union when they were fighting for better pay and working conditions. “We reached out to them and said nobody’s doing anything about labor, nobody’s doing anything about organizing. We need assistance.” Her voice cracked as she continued. “And they helped us when nobody else would.” Her words attested to the potential of this new experiment — both the power of A2 members, and our responsibility to support them.

Community organizing depends on little actions: finding the right door, filling the coffee machine, getting people in the room. Those actions, combined with the guidance of experienced hands, can snowball into a movement.

In a few weeks, we’ll be at our next training in Cleveland. Hopefully, the doors will be unlocked. But without a doubt, Rathke and his team will be there with coffee and king cake (or donuts), and I’ll watch another room of people move closer to becoming a collective force for change.

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