QC Tenant Alliance
In partnership with the Quad Cities Housing Council and the QC Housing Cluster, QCI will be creating the QC Tenant Alliance (QCTA). The QCTA will work to improve the lives of tenants in the Quad Cities through capacity-building, movement-building, and local/statewide advocacy. The Tenants Alliance will seek to support and strengthen the movement for renters’ rights in the Quad Cities.
Detailed Information about the QC Tenant Alliance
Mission
Organize Tenants in the Quad Cities to form a community alliance of tenants.
The tenants associate will work to improve the lives of tenants in the Quad Cities through capacity-building, movement-building, and local/statewide advocacy. Tenants association will seek to support and strengthen the movement for renters' rights in the Quad Cities
We believe that housing is a human right, not a commodity, and every person has a right to be at the table when decisions are made about their lives. We advance policy that is driven from tenant experience. To resist displacement, we must organize renters and other allied groups to make strong and bold demands of those in power.
Organizing for tenants' rights to us means organizing tenant unions and building associations, building tenant power for the long-term. If we are to win the most transformative policy, we must center our movements around the leadership of those most affected: low-income communities and communities of color.
We seek alignment with other movements fighting against structural oppression because tenants do not live single-issue lives, and the right to housing will only be won by building power with other movements. This includes, but is not limited to, movements that build collective power and are rooted in racial, gender, economic, environmental, and disability justice; trans and queer liberation, and indigenous sovereignty.
What are "tenants' rights"?
The following represents key issue areas we focus on under the umbrella of "tenant protections."
What will the Tenants Association Do?
The following are core strategies for our coalition and day-to-day work.
- Build a city wide QC Tenant Alliance and Tenants Unions (Capacity Building)
1) Support emerging local Tenants Unions (Capacity Building)
- Help develop local organizing & counseling
- Develop replicable models for tenant education and organizing in the Quad Cities and training programs to disseminate this model.
- Support the formation of building-wide and citywide tenants' unions, and dissemination of direct action tactics.
- Train hotline volunteers to help build capacity for supporting local counselors, organizers, advocates.
- Technical assistance: Advise on renters’ rights campaigns
- Legal TA/advice on organizational structure, drafting legislation. Referrals to tenant lawyers for legal help. Organizing and training lawyers to assist tenant groups through the Tenant Lawyer Network.
- Communications TA including opposition talking points, media training, social media training, narrative and storytelling trainings.
- Organizing strategy hubs to share best practices, lessons learned of past and recent tenants’ rights campaigns.
- Develop resources for all tenants in the Quad Cities
- Free organizing toolkits for issues, educational webinars, sample letters to landlords
- Utilize the tenant hotline as a referral system and strategic resource
- Publish web-based know-your-rights resources, including fact sheets
2) Connect and Unite Tenant Groups Statewide (Movement Building)
- Trans-local power-building: bringing tenant groups together to share best practices, successes, inspire each other, create a united front, and develop shared strategy.
- Member organization calls/videoconferences to develop shared strategies
- Convenings, assemblies to developed a shared vision & analysis
- Document local strategies & successes to build momentum and narrative power
- Partner with Homes for All to build capacity and intentionally connect renters’ rights work to a broader housing justice framework**
- Shift the narrative in support for renters through statewide media outreach, communications, events, talking points, and amplify local work.
- Amplify translocal renters’ rights campaigns
- Articulate clear model for tenant organizing & building long-term power
- Conduct communications trainings for campaigns and tenant spokespeople for media
3) Effectively Represent Tenant Groups in the Capitol and Become a Force to Be Reckoned with in Springfield and Des Moines (Statewide Advocacy)
- Connect statewide advocacy work with movement-building work
- Share expertise on state advocacy, legislature, and politics with member orgs
- Engage member orgs in building relationships with state representatives
- Monitor legislation and keep tenant groups informed & engaged
- Monitor court cases, file amicus briefs and/or intervene in litigation
- Grow Tenants Together’s role as a coalition of member organizations making unified and strategic demands for policy change
- Conduct briefings of legislative staff, lead lobby days, testify at hearings, letters on legislation
- Public spotlight on legislators for accountability; Issue annual legislative scorecard
- Help develop local organizing & counseling
- Develop replicable models for tenant education and organizing in the Quad Cities. Develop training programs to disseminate and replicate this model.
- Support the formation of building-wide and citywide tenants' unions , and dissemination of direct action tactics.
- Train hotline volunteers to help build capacity for supporting local counselors, organizers, advocates.
- Technical assistance: Advise on renters’ rights campaigns
- Legal TA/advice on organizational structure, drafting legislation. Referrals to tenant lawyers for legal help. Organizing and training lawyers to assist tenant groups through (Unsure but will research more)
- Communications TA including opposition talking points, media training, social media training, narrative and storytelling trainings.
- Organizing strategy hubs to share best practices, lessons learned of past and recent tenants’ rights campaigns. Organizing training for tenants and association members.
- Develop resources for all tenants in Rock Islan
- Free organizing toolkits for issues, educational webinars, sample letters to landlords
- Utilize the tenant hotline as a referral system and strategic resource
- Publish web-based know-your-rights resources, including fact sheets
What is our long-term strategy for success?
The Tenants Association works to address the root causes of housing insecurity by supporting and uniting local tenants in Rock Island. The Tenant Alliance will be a coalition of tenants and relating organizations building the capacity of local tenant groups, connecting organizations in a statewide movement (possible statewide connection for larger impact), and collectively advocating for city and statewide policy change.
We believe that a strong local tenants association, united across the city, is the cornerstone of the tenant rights movement and are essential for progress toward housing justice. We also know that we cannot do this alone, and that the struggle for housing justice is intimately connected to broader movements for racial, economic and social justice. A strong tenant movement acting in coalition with allies will realize a world where renters are treated with dignity as equal members of the community, where people’s basic need for housing is valued over profits, and where we reverse the deepening inequality and poverty among Rock Islands most vulnerable communities.
The Tenants Association will be a part of the Gamaliel National Network to continue to receive organizing development, training and strategy. This will ensure ongoing organizing, growth and sustainability.
The following is a graphic that represents our current "theory of change" meant to guide the bigger picture of our work.
What is Community Organizing?
Community organizing is the process of building power through involving a constituency in identifying problems they share and the solutions to those problems that they desire; identifying the people and structures that can make those solutions possible; enlisting those targets in the effort through negotiation and using confrontation and pressure when needed; and building an institution that is democratically controlled by that constituency that can develop the capacity to take on further problems and that embodies the will and the power of that constituency.
Heather Booth, founder of the Midwest Academy and legendary community organizer, expressed the fundamentals in this formula:
OOO = Organizers Organize Organizations.
Community organizing is NOT a technique for problem solving. Those who would use simple confrontation or mass meetings to meet their own selfish need for power, and skip the step of democratic involvement and control in the selecting of issues, the crafting of demands or the negotiating of the victory are called demagogues. Their organizations are a hollow sham, without the empowering aspect that humanizes and ennobles the effort.
Community organizing is not merely a process that is good for its own sake. Unless the organization wins concrete, measurable benefits for those who participate, it will not last long. The groups that content themselves with holding endless meetings and plod along involving everyone in discussions that never lead to action or to victory are doomed to shrink into nothing. People want to see results. That's why they get involved. There is a theory (isn't there always?) that says that folks join up if two things are true. First, they must see a potential for either benefit or harm to themselves if the group succeeds or fails. Second, they must see that their personal involvement has an impact on the whole effort. This makes sense to me. Winning is critical, but if the group's going to win whether I get involved or not - if my personal involvement is not critical - then I can stay home and watch TV.
Community organizing is not just a neighborhood thing, not just a minority thing, not just a 60's thing. Many - especially those uncomfortable with a particular community organizing effort because it's confronting them at the time - seek to 'label' organizing as somehow out of date or out of place. The fact is that the method, the strategy the science of community organizing has been applied all over the world in situations as disparate as Solidarity in Poland, Welfare Rights in the US and 'communidades del base' in Brazil. The simple principles of community organizing are being applied right now in the barrios of San Antonio and in the ghettoes of Baltimore. They are winning victories and building power. We can too.
Steps to Building the Tenant Alliance
- Identify and Train tenant leaders
- Identify Ally org
- Form Stearing committee
- Develop by-laws and apply for 501c3
- Implement Three Factors of Change/Organize
Three Phase Theory of Change
