New Website: Community Organizing and Family Issues

Posted by on December 1, 2008

Community Organizing and Family Issues (COFI) is thrilled to announce the launch of our new website: http://www.cofionline.org

COFI’s unique model of Family Focused Organizing builds the leadership of low-income parents (mostly mothers and grandmothers) and engages them in action campaigns to transform their communities and the policies and institutions that impact their families. COFI’s model emphasizes the interconnection between personal struggles and broader community issues and builds leaders’ capacity to address these issues at both a personal level and through public action.

Over the past decade, COFI has successfully built the leadership and power of over 2,200 low-income parents – primarily African American and Latino women, including recent immigrants, single parents, TANF recipients, and public housing residents. These parent leaders in turn have been able to successfully eliminate “Zero Tolerance” language from the Chicago Public School discipline code and replace it with a philosophy of restorative justice. They are working to reinstate recess in public elementary schools in the city, and to address barriers for low-income families to access early learning programs in Illinois – among other community and policy issues.

Based in Chicago, COFI offers training and technical assistance to organizations across the country who want to learn the Family Focused Organizing model and implement it in their own schools and communities. Through COFI’s new website, you can get more information on upcoming trainings and order from a series of step-by-step training manuals to enable organizers, trainers, social service agencies, and community
development organizations to incorporate Family Focused Organizing into their work.

President-elect Barack Obama was one of COFI’s founding sponsoring committee members (a fun factoid that you can read about on the new website). As Obama’s victory demonstrates to the world the incredible power of organizing, COFI is pleased to be able to share our model with a broader audience through http://www.cofionline.org.