Partners

The Ohio Organizing Collaborative

MVOC is a founding member of the the Ohio Organizing Collaborative, a long-term organizing effort that knits together strategic constituencies at the neighborhood, union and congregational levels to build sustainable power in Ohio. The goal of this effort is to ultimately build a broad and deep enough base to exercise governance power committed to the interests of low-income and working class people.

OOC is composed of a strong base of community organizations and labor unions committed to this collaboration: 

The East Side Organizing Project (ESOP) was founded in 1993 to create organized leadership around issues impacting neighborhood life in the Cleveland area. In the late 1990's, ESOP began to shift its focus toward predatory lending and foreclosures. Over the past several years, much of ESOP's work has focused on foreclosure prevention in Cuyahoga County. ESOP is currently expanding its efforts throughout the state of Ohio and has added offices in seven locations outside of Cleveland. In August of 2007, ESOP changed its name to "Empowering and Strengthening Ohio's People" to emphasize the new state-wide focus.  ESOP uses direct action organizing tactics to produce results for community residents most affected by the issues at hand. Community leaders remain at the forefront of these efforts, as they are in the best position to create and implement effective solutions.

The central mission of the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity is to contribute meaningfully to the field of research and scholarship on race, ethnicity and social justice, to assist in reframing the way that we talk about, think about and act on race and ethnicity, and to deepen the understanding of the causes and consequences of and solutions to racial and ethnic hierarchy and disparity so that we can envision and realize a society that is fair and just for all people, where opportunity is not limited by race, ethnicity, gender, or class, where democratic ideals inform social policy, and where all people recognize and embrace the universal responsibility that each person has for the welfare of every other person.  All of our research and scholarship is intended to have an implicit or explicit impact on policies in the real world. By creating a research-based structural lens to look at racism, we are shifting not only the way that racism is conceptualized, but also the way we conceive of strategies to counteract its impact. In shifting the way we talk about, think about and act on race, we hope to give new meaning to the proposition that human destinies are intertwined.

UFCW Local 75 represents a recent merger between Local 1099 and Local 911, making it one of the largest private sector unions in the country. With 30,000 members at more than 500 locations, they stretch along the I-75 corridor from Toledo to Cincinnati and points south. UFCW 75 is a leader in organizing among communities of color, as well as in developing innovative partnerships with faith and other community partners. Working men and women across the United States and Canada are proud to call the United Food and Commercial Workers their union. UFCW’s 1.3 million members work in a range of industries, with the majority working in retail food, meatpacking and poultry, food processing and manufacturing, and retail stores. We are North America’s neighborhood union, and the largest union of young workers with 40 percent of UFCW members under the age of 30. 

The Ohio Baptist State Convention, under President Michael Harrison, has grown to more than seventy congregations across eleven cities in Ohio.  The Ohio Baptist Convention runs an extensive GOTV program and has been actively involved in organizing campaigns across the state.  The Convention has churches in Toledo, Cleveland, Youngstown, Warren, Alliance, Canton, Massillon, Akron, Cincinnati and Columbus.

The AMOS Project is a multi-racial community organizing project of over 30 congregations committed to living out their faith through public action in Greater Cincinnati and Ohio. Dedicated to promoting justice and improving the lives of people in the community, AMOS develops and trains low-income and working class people to become leaders able to bring their voice and influence to bear on the public decisions which impact their cities, their neighborhoods and their families.  In 2008, AMOS coordinated a massive Get Out the Vote and healthcare reform mobilization, canvassing thousands on blocks and collecting more than 5,000 signed pledges supporting health care access for all.  In 2006 and 2007, AMOS worked in collaboration with SEIU Local 3, UFCW 1099, and the building trades to win a monumental community benefits agreement for $700 million dollar redevelopment project in downtown Cincinnati. 

NOAH is a faith-based grass-roots organizing coalition in Cuyahoga County. We seek to live out our common faith values through public action. In doing so, we work to  do two things: establish policies and practices in the Northeast Ohio region that bring about justice and equity; and empower the faith community by investing in the development of leaders and pastors through training and action. We are building a powerful movement within the faith community, business community and all who would partner with us. We are enabled to make real sustainable change by developing into a power organization. We do this by organizing people and money.  Currently, NOAH is engaged in a broad based organizing campaign around school reform in East Cleveland and on a statewide level. 

SEIU Local 1 unites more than 50,000 property service workers throughout seven states in the Central United States.  Our members include janitors, security officers, residential doormen and maintenance workers, window cleaners, industrial workers, and theater and stadium workers.  Together, we are winning livable wages, health care benefits, and full-time work.  SEIU Local 1 members continue to work to build strength for all working people, on the job and in our communities.

SEIU District 1199 represents more than 27,000 health care and social service workers across West Virginia, Kentucky and Ohio. The Union is a part of the Service Employees International Union, whose 1.9 million members make it the largest union in the country, as well as the largest health care union in the nation. SEIU 1199 has a long, proud history.

Founded in 1932 by Leon Davis, District 1199 began in New York City as a union of pharmacists, porters, "soda jerks" and cosmeticians. Our District began to organize in the mid-1970's in West Virginia, and Ohio and Kentucky soon followed.

Local 1059 now represents members in 47 counties in central, north-northwest, and south-southeast Ohio.

The Mahoning Valley Organizing Collaborative is a broad based community organization operating in Mahoning, Trumbull and Columbiana County in Northeast Ohio.  MVOC unites churches, neighborhood associations, block clubs, unions, schools, cultural, and non—profit organizations to organize and develop leaders to radically change structures that perpetuate poverty, racism, and social injustice.  We do this work through community organizing.  Organizing enables people to imagine a different reality.  It involves everyday people having a real voice in the decisions that affect their lives.  In the words of one organizer, “Community organizing provides the vehicle by which elements of knowledge, skills, and experience are attained by families and neighborhoods.”  MVOC’s approach involves formal trainings, research, identifying common issues, creating collective and strategic ways to address those issues, and systematically strengthening institutions.  

Collectively, the organizations have an organized base in every major metropolitan area in Ohio, 65 full time professional community organizers, and a membership base of neighborhood residents, congregational members, and union members of more than 150,000 people in Ohio.

Guiding Principles

The overall vision of the Collaborative is to build a transformative base of power – and a transformative set of relationships between community organizing networks, labor unions, faith based organizations, and other partners. Our experience is that even the best alliances tend to be transactional. We come together around a ballot initiative, an organizing campaign, or a contract fight. When that activity ends, our effort to relate to one another comes to a trickle. In addition, we tend to operate in silos creating distinctions between labor, faith, and union organizing that should not and do not exist. It is time for the parts to equal the sum. From the outset, we see a defining set of principles that must distinguish this effort from the many coalitions that have failed to create a transformative set of relationships.

1. Principle One: The OOC is a permanent long term alliance. It is not a momentary coalition around an issue or campaign. We are not building for the next six months, but for the next twenty five years.
2. Principle Two: The OOC is built around organizing groups. In other words, groups must have organizing staff and must be able to deliver a base. The OOC is exclusive and we are not recruiting all comers or groups that are not fundamentally rooted in organizing. As a part of this, we are asking/will ask every organization to put money on the table to fund the OOC from our own budgets. We want groups that are deeply invested for the long haul.
3. Principle Three: Faith based, neighborhood based, workplace (union) organizing are complimentary not competitive. Each one of these models is fundamental to building a transformative base and we cannot win unless we figure out how to knit these together. We have organizing efforts in many of the same cities which is an opportunity as opposed to challenge. We will not build new community organizing projects or engage in workplace organizing that is in direct competition with our respective constituencies.
4. Principle Four: Issues and campaigns are the drivers, not end goal. There is great temptation to focus on and be swept up by our collective ability to move statewide issues. While that is fundamental and half the point, the end goal is building a truly transformative base in Ohio that moves on multiple levels – in the church basement, the neighborhood meeting, the union hall, and electorally. The vision is not a legislative victory here and there, but a reconstitution of the states politics.
5. Principle Five: This Collaborative does not create more work for each of our respective organizations, but enhances existing work.
6. Principle Six: A belief in power that is rooted in self-interest but also transcends it. We embrace the universals of organizing (ie. That change requires tension, the action is in the reaction, etc.) but we are not limited by the traditional and somewhat narcissistic ambition to only build our own brand. We believe that power is not a zero sum game and that the only way to have it more substantially is to work together.