Our founders shared the strategy of  “Neighborhoods First”: they organized around what matters most at the local level. Some call this “Stopsign” organizing: win something you need on your block or street. Gale Cincotta and Shel Trapp wanted to stop redlining in Chicago, when banks refused to lend in Black and Brown neighborhoods. Lois Gibbs wanted to clean up toxic waste after she discovered her Niagara Falls neighborhood, Love Canal, was built on top of a chemical waste dump. 

Gale Cincotta got started in organizing in the Austin neighborhood of Chicago through the PTA because her youngest son’s elementary school was severely overcrowded. Shel Trapp was a Methodist minister for seven years and active in civil rights before leaving to become a community organizer at the Organization for a Better Austin (OBA). Gale and Shel met in 1967 and started organizing around school and housing issues. In 1968, Gale was elected the first woman president of OBA, the first for an organization founded by organizer Saul Alinsky. Gale and Shel founded the National Training and Information Center (NTIC) and National People’s Action (NPA), and helped pass the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act and Community Reinvestment Act, which forced banks to reinvest in neighborhoods they had targeted with discriminatory lending.

Neighborhood organizers soon realized the problems they faced were systemic, so needed national solutions. Starting in 1972, they organized national gatherings, which live on today as the People’s Action national conventions, and campaigns which led to policy victories that include the Community Reinvestment Act, which forced banks to reinvest in neighborhoods they had excluded, the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA) and Superfund, which forced polluters to pay to clean up toxic waste.

Fired for organizing clerical workers in Chicago, Heather Booth uses money from her NLRB settlement to found the Midwest Academy, to mix lessons of the freedom schools and civil rights struggle with the skills of community organizing, and put training and strategic planning at the center of the movement for social justice. The academy’s founding goals are to combine the vision and spirit of progressive movements with the practical skills of grassroots organizing, to elevate the role of women in organizing, forge a path to progressive change through multi-state organizations for the emerging labor, women’s rights, and environmental movements, and create a comprehensive training program that provides organizers with the fundamental skills needed to build and sustain power.

Midwest Academy provides training to Citizen Action groups and many others and helps initiate multi-issue statewide organizing groups, a unique coalition approach with an emphasis on deeper organizing and community labor alliances.

13 Chicago groups form the Metropolitan Area Housing Alliance (MAHA) to address citywide housing issues. They meet with the Federal Home Loan Bank of Chicago and Federal Home Loan Bank Board, which forces mortgage surveys and results in a report, “Study of the Factors of Risk in Urban Mortgage Lending,” by the FSLIC. Chicago passes a Disclosure Ordinance requiring anti-redlining pledges from banks seeking city funds. The Illinois legislature passes laws prohibiting redlining and requiring disclosure. After two years of fighting, homebuyers under FHA’s Sections 203 and 221 can be reimbursed for the cost of repairing structural defects as part of the Housing and Community Development Act of 1974. Illinois amends its savings & loan rules to prohibit redlining, a first in the country. 

CRA legislation in Congress with hearings held in Boston, Chicago, Atlanta, Dallas, San Francisco, and New York. Sixth Annual “State of the Neighborhoods” Conference held in D.C. with 2,500 people from 109 cities; delegates are angry that HUD has made no new appointments to regional/area offices after President Carter calls HUD “biggest slumlord” in country; “action” taken to occupy office of Patricia Roberts Harris, Secretary of HUD. Cincotta supports passage of a bill to create the Neighborhood Reinvestment Corporation that will expand the Urban Reinvestment Task Force’s Neighborhood Housing Services program nationally campaigns to prod and entice the private sector to invest in communities. October 12th, CRA S. 406 passes as Title VIII of Housing and Community Development Act, effective November 6th, 1978. CRA is the 15th national structural reform to be won through neighborhood organizing that ties back to the work of Saul Alinsky.

Intent on protecting the legislation leaders fought so hard to win, NPA pushes for renewal of the Community Reinvestment Act and the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act. NPA leaders march American Bankers Association (ABA) President John Perkins out of the hall at their annual conference in D.C., after he gives a lukewarm response to NPA demands. The next day, leaders take over the ABA’s Washington boardroom and demand to be placed on the ABA agenda at the bankers’ convention in New Orleans that fall. NPA then stages the “Battle of New Orleans” at the ABA convention, after NPA leaders are denied a chance to talk to the banks about HMDA. They meet bankers outside their convention hall and at social functions, including onboard a riverboat the ABA had chartered for a cruise, during three days of non-stop actions. The next February, the ABA tells the Senate Banking Committee it no longer opposes the renewal of HMDA.

To turn back the tide of the Reagan Revolution, People’s Action’s legacy organizations launched larger, more visible campaigns like “Reclaim America” and the “Showdown in Chicago,” which brought together National People’s Action (NPA) and the Citizen/Labor Energy Coalition (C/LEC) in a fight to keep energy prices down. C/LEC was started by Heather Booth, who was one of the first to build statewide, not just local, organizations, and to partner with organized labor.

To ensure that no other community would have to face a toxic health threat alone, Lois Gibbs founds the Citizens Clearinghouse for Hazardous Waste, now known as the Center for Health, Environment, & Justice (CHEJ). Lois realized that no local, state, or national organization existed to provide communities with the strategic advice, guidance, and technical assistance necessary to win such a battle on their own. Since 1981, CHEJ has helped more than 15,000 groups—comprising roughly 2.25 million people—successfully fight environmental health threats across the country. 

Citizen Action argues for the combination of organizing with elections, a controversial position in 1980, with a speech Heather Booth gives called “Left with the Ballot Box.” She initiated the electoral-focused State and Local Leadership Project that taught many organizations how to run electoral campaigns and build ongoing power within our organizations to ensure accountability and support, where needed, after the campaign. Citizen Action recruits and elects over 100 candidates and works in many other campaigns often providing the margin of victory with our canvass and popular base. Midwest Academy holds annual “advances” that develop the progressive populist vision and agenda that ground the issue and electoral work. Also launching at this time is the Citizen Leadership Foundation, one of the largest voter registration efforts in the U.S.

As Wall Street’s grip on the economy grows, National People’s Action fights to defend and expand the Community Reinvestment Act, and keep pressure on the Federal Housing Administration to stop funding lenders with high foreclosure rates. Citizen Action and its state affiliates lead an eight-year battle for universal quality health care, which ends with the defeat of the Health Care Security Act in 1994. In 1996, Citizen Action raises millions of dollars to turn out the vote to win back Congressional seats from the radical Republicans whose “Contract with America” led to multiple government shutdowns.

Midwest Academy sets up Fund For the Future, raising money to bring together the members of Citizen Action, which closes its doors in 1997, with independent statewide organizations and organized labor, including AFSCME, CWA, and SEIU. Together, they found USAction and the USAction Education Fund in 1999. 

When NPA cofounder Gale Cincotta dies on August 15, 2001, in her last words to organizers Joe Mariano and Alicia Mendoza she asks them to “Get the crooks!”

 NPA hires Sulma Arias as its first organizer for workers’ and immigrant rights in 2003. In 2007, under its new director, George Goehl, NPA launches a “Save The American Dream” campaign, with direct actions at the home and office of Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke to demand action for homeowners facing foreclosure, at HUD to end the demolition of public housing, and at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) to reduce the naturalization backlog which held hundreds of thousands of immigrants hostage.

On April 29, 2010, in the wake of the nationwide financial crisis, over 15,000 people take to the streets in lower Manhattan, with surprise actions in advance at bank headquarters in midtown as part of a “Showdown on Wall Street” organized by NPA and the AFL-CIO. This is the biggest demonstration to date by labor and community forces to demand financial reform that benefits workers and neighborhoods, not just banks. Americans for Financial Reform (AFR), with Heather Booth as its founding director, leads the fight to pass the Dodd-Frank Wall Street and Consumer Reform Act. 

Large national networks of grassroots member organizations and advocacy groups vote to create People’s Action (501c4) and the People’s Action Institute (501c3), a single network with the power to fight at a national scale to advance structural solutions for the economic and racial inequities that underpin problems faced by local communities. This new network has more than a million members in 40 states, and the merger includes National People’s Action and the National People’s Action Campaign, USAction and the USAction Education Fund, the Campaign and Institute for America’s Future, the Center for Health and Environmental Justice (CHEJ), Community Organizations in Action (COA), and the Alliance for a Just Society (AJS). A total of nine national organizations (five 501c3 and four 501c4) unite through this merger. AJS and COA leave this alliance in 2018.

The newly formed People’s Action Institute launches powerful issue campaigns that reflect the concerns of our members: Health Care for All, People and Planet First, Housing Justice, and Overdose Crisis. More than a thousand leaders from the organizations that merged to form our national network come to Washington, D.C. for the founding convention. 72 affiliate members take a pledge onstage with Sen. Bernie Sanders to run for office, guided by the principles of the “Rise Up” platform. These include racial equity, gender equity, an economy that works for all of us, truly representative democracy, dignity at work, ending mass incarceration and rebuilding our communities, health care as a human right, climate justice, education equity, and a just immigration system. “Let me begin by thanking the People’s Action network for making the political revolution,” Sanders said. “You are what the revolution looks like!”

As part of the People’s Action national convention in Washington, D.C.,CHEJ leads a delegation of 800 community leaders to EPA headquarters to demand that EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler meet with them to hear their stories. As a result of this protest, the EPA agrees to meet with leadership and listen to their demands. CHEJ then launches the No More Sacrifice Zones campaign to organize people who are poisoned by corporate greed and environmental injustice and at high risk for COVID-19 complications to lead a national effort that ends the sacrificing of their families and our planet.

People’s Action Institute launches its Movement Governing Program in 2016 to train and encourage movement leaders as they consider running for public office, then to support them once elected through mobilization and promoting policy initiatives.  In 2017, our Rural and Small Town Organizing Cohort knocks on 392,000 doors of rural voters and conducts deep canvass experiments to change hearts and minds about immigration. The success of these experiments lays the groundwork for 2020, when People’s Action hosts People’s Presidential Forums in Nevada, New Hampshire and Iowa. In 2022, Sulma Arias returns to People’s Action and the People’s Action Institute as our new executive director.