Industrial Areas Foundation
CBS News: Nehemiah Strategy Makes American Dream Possible
Fighting for Justice
Rooted in Community
Working Together for Change
Impact Through Leadership
Who We Are
Founded in 1940, the Industrial Areas Foundation is the nation's largest and longest-standing network of local faith and community-based organizations.
The IAF partners with religious congregations and civic organizations at the local level to build broad-based organizing projects, which create new capacity in a community for leadership development, citizen-led action and relationships across the lines that often divide our communities.
The IAF created the modern model of faith- and broad-based organizing and is widely recognized as having the strongest track record in the nation for citizen leadership development and for helping congregations and other civic organizations act on their missions to achieve lasting change in the world.
The IAF, which includes the
West / Southwest IAF
and
Metro IAF
, currently works with thousands of religious congregations, non-profits, civic organizations and unions, in more than sixty-five cities across the United States and in Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom and Germany.
Latest from the blog
posted by
Industrial Areas Foundation
5sc
March 09, 2026
The Atlantic: Nehemiah Homeownership 'Changed Lives, Transformed Neighborhoods'
[Excerpt]
In the early 1980s, when I was a tenant organizer in Brooklyn’s predominantly Black East Flatbush neighborhood, a local minister told me about a plan to build single-family homes in nearby Brownsville. I stifled my disbelief. Only a few weeks earlier, a tenant leader and I had stood on the roof of her building and looked eastward toward Brownsville, watching as a fire consumed an apartment building—an arsonist had set it alight....
I was too pessimistic. A few years earlier, a group of ministers had met in a church basement in Brownsville with Edward Chambers, an organizer from the Industrial Areas Foundation. Based in Chicago, the IAF had been started in the 1940s by the tough-talking activist Saul Alinsky. Alinsky’s approach to organizing became axiomatic for IAF branches around the country: Teach people to wield power, and never do for others what they could do for themselves....

The IAF has seeded fraternal organizations in other borough that have helped build 2,800 more Nehemiah homes in New York, along with schools. In each residential development, prospective homeowners are required to have good credit and must be able to make a down payment. During the foreclosure crisis brought on by the 2008 recession, Black and Latino neighborhoods in the city were particularly affected, and deed theft was rife. But little of that sadness was visited upon Nehemiah homes. Their foreclosure rate remained below 1 percent.
Over more than four decades, residents of the various Nehemiah developments have acquired something precious...

[Photo Credit: Christopher Khani / The Atlantic]
The Left Shouldn't Demonize Homeowners, The Atlantic [pdf]
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posted by
Industrial Areas Foundation
5sc
April 23, 2025
Remembering Ed Chambers
Edward Chambers, Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF) National Director, died 10 years ago on April 26, 2015.  We stop to remember "Big Ed” Chambers, as Studs Terkel affectionately and respectfully called him, for his leadership to create the modern IAF after the death of IAF’s founder & Ed Chambers’ mentor Saul Alinsky.
IAF organizers and leaders are inheritors of the IAF legacy Ed Chambers created along with other organizers and leaders of his and our generation—50+ IAF organizations across the US and abroad, 130 professional organizers and many thousands of trained leaders building and wielding power, doing politics, and winning proudly and strategically to make change on housing, immigrant rights, criminal justice reform, and more at the local level, state, and national levels.  We share these remembrances from 10 years ago to honor Ed Chambers—our teacher, agitator, and public friend.
Willam Chambers
Sam Freedman in New Yorker
Michael Gecan, IAF Co-Director Emeritus
Sister Christine Stephens, former IAF Co-Director
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