Track Record
IAF organizations throughout the country have established a powerful track record for citizen-driven community change.
Below are a few key accomplishments of other IAF projects, that demonstrate the power and potential of institutions working together.
Community Safety
In the 1980s, the organization in Houston developed the nation’s first community policing strategy, resulting in safer neighborhoods and strong relationships between communities and police. This model has transformed the approach of cities to crime and policing across the entire country.
Neighborhood improvement and infrastructure
Communities Organized for Public Service, the organization in San Antonio, won hundreds of millions of dollars of infrastructure investment and street and drainage improvement to long-neglected neighborhoods. IAF organizations around the country have organized hundreds of communities for basic improvements to streets, drainage, stop signs, blight, abandoned lots and other neighborhood issues.
Public Transportation
The Shreveport organization won significant federal and local funding to create after-hours bus service for the first time in Shreveport.
Education
During the late 1990s, IAF organizations in Texas created the Alliance Schools Strategy, teaching parents how to engage effectively with their childrens’ schools and to organize a constituency to improve public education. This strategy created a broad alliance of congregations and institutions to support public education and resulted in a vast increase of funding across Texas for schools and after-school programs.
Blight and Affordable Home Ownership
In the 1980s, areas of Brooklyn and the Bronx used to look like war zones, with blight and abandoned property devastating quality of life. The organization in New York took action, and over the last 15 years, they have built more than 4000 homes in those areas, all affordable, all for lower-income families. They approached affordable home ownership in a way that was responsible and sustainable. While the rest of the country saw an explosion of foreclosures in recent years, fewer than 10 of those 4000 homeowners suffered foreclosure – one of the single lowest foreclosure rates of any neighborhood of any kind.
Workforce Development and Living Wages
The San Antonio organization created Project Quest, widely recognized as one of the most effective workforce development strategies in the country. The Quest model helps high-school drop-outs develop the skills and training to perform in high-wage industries, creating a path to the middle class and economic stability for thousands of families. That model has been implemented by IAF organizations throughout Texas, Arizona, New Mexico and most recently, in Northern and Central Louisiana Interfaith.
The IAF organization in Baltimore created the first living wage strategy in the country, moving thousands of working families from poverty wages to middle-class incomes. That model that has been followed in over 100 cities throughout the nation.
Disaster Recovery
In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, the organizations in dozens of cities brought together thousands of evacuees from new Orleans to address recovering from the disaster. These efforts resulted in fundamental reform of the Road Home program and winning $75 million for a strategy to transform flooded and blighted properties into affordable home ownership.
