Keeping the Faith on Social Issues
The AIM Coalition Brings Power to The Grass Roots
By Cameron W. Barr
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, December 8, 2005; GZ20
Lt. Gov. Michael S. Steele (R) was impressed. Sitting in a Bethesda church one evening last month,
he watched as Montgomery County Executive Douglas M. Duncan (D) deferentially reported to more
than 350 people filling the pews that he was making good on promises to provide more affordable
housing.
Duncan was interrogated briefly at the podium before his turn was over. Then came Steele, whose
time at the microphone was just as short.
The lieutenant governor told the assembled members of Action In Montgomery, a network of
congregations that has become perhaps the most powerful grass-roots organization in the county,
that he was making progress on an immigration issue they had raised with him.
For political leaders accustomed to being permitted an evasive answer and the opportunity to speak
at length, the AIM treatment is bracing.
"I've never seen anything like it," Steele said last week. "They can get politicians to stand at attention,
to pay attention, to be responsive, to account for their actions."
AIM has the sort of below-the-radar influence that can catch a candidate's eye -- Steele is running for
the U.S. Senate, and Duncan for governor. Nearly 32,000 adults belong to the 31 churches and one
synagogue that make up AIM, a veritable horde of potential voters in a jurisdiction where some 2002
County Council races hinged on a difference of a thousand or so votes. Last year, AIM drew more
than 1,000 people to a single meeting.
The group brings together residents from across Montgomery, meaning that its meetings are
ethnically and economically more diverse than most county audiences. And while its agenda is
secular, AIM is organized around congregations, groups that politicians routinely court.
In seven years of organizing, AIM has achieved some victories, most notably in pushing the county to
do more to provide affordable housing. Now it is preparing to become "the largest political turnout
group Montgomery County has ever seen," in the words of the Rev. Pearl Selby, pastor of Oak Grove
AME-Zion Church in Gaithersburg and an AIM leader.
Barred by law from making political endorsements, the group's get-out-the-vote drive for the 2006
election won't include backing individual office-seekers. Instead, AIM will define an agenda of issues
and then let voters know how candidates measure up. Judging from the group's current priorities
and discussions about future goals, that agenda will likely demand commitments to affordable
housing, to making life easier for Montgomery's many immigrants and to helping those with limited
access to health care.
Most advocacy groups bring together people who are concerned about a single issue, such as the
environment or the pace of growth or sex education in the schools. AIM organizers, meeting
one-on-one or in small groups with pastors and members of their congregations, bring people
together and let topics for action bubble up.
"The issues aren't important for us," said Alisa Glassman, AIM's lead organizer. "The issues are just
the glue to get people involved in democracy, to get them involved politically."
AIM is an affiliate of the Industrial Areas Foundation, a Chicago-based nonprofit organization
founded in 1940 that says its "primary purpose is power" and its "chief product is social change."
While AIM and IAF affiliates seem on the surface to mix religion and politics, "they are pretty
relentless that they are not trying to pursue a religious agenda," said Mark R. Warren, an associate
professor of education at Harvard University and the author of a 2001 book on an IAF affiliate in
Texas. "Faith institutions are arguably our strongest set of institutions in society, independent of
government and independent of business."
'The Agenda Is the Person'
Mark Fraley, who served as AIM's lead organizer from 1998 to mid-2005, held hundreds of individual
and house meetings to build AIM, each centering on some key questions: What's important to you?
What values do you hold? What makes you angry? These discussions, he said, help build an
organization that can be political without being partisan and yield an agenda that closely reflects its
constituents' priorities. "The agenda is the person," Fraley said.
The IAF has 56 affiliates in the United States, Europe and Canada. Most of the groups are based in
cities -- including Baltimore and the District -- although a handful reach into suburbia. AIM, said
Jonathan Lange, a member of the IAF's national staff, is "very suburban" in that it wasn't founded as
an adjunct to an urban affiliate. In the Washington area, the IAF is in the early stages of creating new
affiliates in Howard County and Northern Virginia, Lange said.
AIM's budget for 2005 is $227,500, which pays the salaries of two organizers and other costs. The
money comes from congregations, which pay 1 percent of their operating budgets up to a limit of
$10,000, and from nongovernmental grants. "You can't hold politicians accountable if they're paying
your salary," Glassman said.
The organization emphasizes developing productive relationships with elected leaders and
government officials. Duncan said he embraced AIM from its early days in the late 1990s.
"Faith-based advocates for social justice is what we need more of in our county," he said.
"I don't find [AIM] as negative or hostile or accusatory as some of the other groups sometimes are,"
said Elizabeth B. Davison, Montgomery's director of housing and community affairs.
Duncan's support led to some of AIM's most concrete successes: a council vote in 2001 to double
the funding, to $15 million, for Montgomery's Housing Initiative Fund, which is used primarily to
renovate and improve the county's affordable housing stock. That was followed in 2003 by a council
vote to dedicate 2.5 percent of the county's property-tax revenue to support the fund each year.
Duncan pursued the increased funding at AIM's urging. Saralee S. Todd, a Duncan adviser, said, "It
was AIM that brought the concept [of the dedicated funding] to Doug." And while the council initially
rejected the funding mechanism in 2001 by a vote of 8 to 1, a 6 to 3 majority approved the idea two
years later, following an AIM campaign that featured meetings that brought out hundreds of
supporters of the plan.
Todd estimated that Duncan has met with AIM representatives 30 times since the late 1990s.
Duncan said he meets with only one other citizens group -- the NAACP -- as frequently as he does
with AIM.
Council member Phil Andrews (D-Gaithersburg-Rockville) said Progressive Maryland, an advocacy
group that promoted passage of the 2002 "living wage" law that Andrews sponsored, has been as
influential as AIM, although he noted that the group is now focused mainly on statewide issues.
AIM has also backed successful efforts to improve taxicab services, especially for elderly residents,
and to convince the county to offer developers the opportunity to build on some parcels of
county-owned land on the condition that they include affordable units in such projects.
Steele and Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D) are assisting AIM in its effort to convince the federal
government to open a full-service immigration office in Montgomery County to complement the
district office in Baltimore. Because 66 percent of Maryland's foreign-born population lives in
Montgomery and Prince George's counties, AIM and its supporters argue, Washington's Maryland
suburbs need a full-service office to reduce the travel time and disruption for immigrants who are
required to present themselves in Baltimore.
A spokesman for the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services agency of the Department of
Homeland Security, which oversees such offices, indicated that AIM may be reaching too high on
this issue. "It doesn't appear feasible to locate a new office in that part of Maryland," said Bill
Strassberger.
Immigrants in Hawaii and Alaska generally must fly to the nearest full-service immigration office,
Strassberger added, and those in states such as Idaho and Maine must drive several hours each
way.
Influence of Immigrants
The federal government may not see the logic of providing more services for immigrants in
Montgomery, but an AIM-sponsored house meeting in Burtonsville last month made clear where the
organization gets such ideas.
The session brought together 18 people, some from an AIM member congregation, the Church of
the Resurrection in Burtonsville. Most of the meeting's participants were immigrants from
Cameroon, Nigeria, Ethiopia and other African countries. The conversation focused on one
participant's suggestion that the county provide a "welcome center" for new immigrants to provide
referrals to employment opportunities, offer English instruction and advise newcomers on "how to
navigate the system."
(The people at the house meeting were unaware that Montgomery already provides such services at
its Gilchrist Center for Cultural Diversity in Wheaton and, to a lesser extent, at the Upcounty Regional
Services Center in Germantown.)
Resurrection parishioners then brought the gist of the discussion to an AIM "strategy session" at
Cedar Lane Unitarian Universalist Church in Bethesda on Nov. 30, where many other congregations
reported on house meetings of their own. The strategy session yielded a long list of issues,
including health care for the uninsured, eliminating what participants said were ethnic and racial
biases in school testing, and the need to continue helping immigrants.
Laurence A. Froehlich, a member of Kehilat Shalom synagogue in Gaithersburg and an AIM leader,
ran a disciplined, good-natured meeting of 75 or so people that began and ended with prayer.
"For many people," he said, "for thousands, we are the only voice that they have to our political
leadership."
© 2005 The Washington Post Company
The AIM Coalition Brings Power to The Grass Roots
By Cameron W. Barr
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, December 8, 2005; GZ20
Lt. Gov. Michael S. Steele (R) was impressed. Sitting in a Bethesda church one evening last month,
he watched as Montgomery County Executive Douglas M. Duncan (D) deferentially reported to more
than 350 people filling the pews that he was making good on promises to provide more affordable
housing.
Duncan was interrogated briefly at the podium before his turn was over. Then came Steele, whose
time at the microphone was just as short.
The lieutenant governor told the assembled members of Action In Montgomery, a network of
congregations that has become perhaps the most powerful grass-roots organization in the county,
that he was making progress on an immigration issue they had raised with him.
For political leaders accustomed to being permitted an evasive answer and the opportunity to speak
at length, the AIM treatment is bracing.
"I've never seen anything like it," Steele said last week. "They can get politicians to stand at attention,
to pay attention, to be responsive, to account for their actions."
AIM has the sort of below-the-radar influence that can catch a candidate's eye -- Steele is running for
the U.S. Senate, and Duncan for governor. Nearly 32,000 adults belong to the 31 churches and one
synagogue that make up AIM, a veritable horde of potential voters in a jurisdiction where some 2002
County Council races hinged on a difference of a thousand or so votes. Last year, AIM drew more
than 1,000 people to a single meeting.
The group brings together residents from across Montgomery, meaning that its meetings are
ethnically and economically more diverse than most county audiences. And while its agenda is
secular, AIM is organized around congregations, groups that politicians routinely court.
In seven years of organizing, AIM has achieved some victories, most notably in pushing the county to
do more to provide affordable housing. Now it is preparing to become "the largest political turnout
group Montgomery County has ever seen," in the words of the Rev. Pearl Selby, pastor of Oak Grove
AME-Zion Church in Gaithersburg and an AIM leader.
Barred by law from making political endorsements, the group's get-out-the-vote drive for the 2006
election won't include backing individual office-seekers. Instead, AIM will define an agenda of issues
and then let voters know how candidates measure up. Judging from the group's current priorities
and discussions about future goals, that agenda will likely demand commitments to affordable
housing, to making life easier for Montgomery's many immigrants and to helping those with limited
access to health care.
Most advocacy groups bring together people who are concerned about a single issue, such as the
environment or the pace of growth or sex education in the schools. AIM organizers, meeting
one-on-one or in small groups with pastors and members of their congregations, bring people
together and let topics for action bubble up.
"The issues aren't important for us," said Alisa Glassman, AIM's lead organizer. "The issues are just
the glue to get people involved in democracy, to get them involved politically."
AIM is an affiliate of the Industrial Areas Foundation, a Chicago-based nonprofit organization
founded in 1940 that says its "primary purpose is power" and its "chief product is social change."
While AIM and IAF affiliates seem on the surface to mix religion and politics, "they are pretty
relentless that they are not trying to pursue a religious agenda," said Mark R. Warren, an associate
professor of education at Harvard University and the author of a 2001 book on an IAF affiliate in
Texas. "Faith institutions are arguably our strongest set of institutions in society, independent of
government and independent of business."
'The Agenda Is the Person'
Mark Fraley, who served as AIM's lead organizer from 1998 to mid-2005, held hundreds of individual
and house meetings to build AIM, each centering on some key questions: What's important to you?
What values do you hold? What makes you angry? These discussions, he said, help build an
organization that can be political without being partisan and yield an agenda that closely reflects its
constituents' priorities. "The agenda is the person," Fraley said.
The IAF has 56 affiliates in the United States, Europe and Canada. Most of the groups are based in
cities -- including Baltimore and the District -- although a handful reach into suburbia. AIM, said
Jonathan Lange, a member of the IAF's national staff, is "very suburban" in that it wasn't founded as
an adjunct to an urban affiliate. In the Washington area, the IAF is in the early stages of creating new
affiliates in Howard County and Northern Virginia, Lange said.
AIM's budget for 2005 is $227,500, which pays the salaries of two organizers and other costs. The
money comes from congregations, which pay 1 percent of their operating budgets up to a limit of
$10,000, and from nongovernmental grants. "You can't hold politicians accountable if they're paying
your salary," Glassman said.
The organization emphasizes developing productive relationships with elected leaders and
government officials. Duncan said he embraced AIM from its early days in the late 1990s.
"Faith-based advocates for social justice is what we need more of in our county," he said.
"I don't find [AIM] as negative or hostile or accusatory as some of the other groups sometimes are,"
said Elizabeth B. Davison, Montgomery's director of housing and community affairs.
Duncan's support led to some of AIM's most concrete successes: a council vote in 2001 to double
the funding, to $15 million, for Montgomery's Housing Initiative Fund, which is used primarily to
renovate and improve the county's affordable housing stock. That was followed in 2003 by a council
vote to dedicate 2.5 percent of the county's property-tax revenue to support the fund each year.
Duncan pursued the increased funding at AIM's urging. Saralee S. Todd, a Duncan adviser, said, "It
was AIM that brought the concept [of the dedicated funding] to Doug." And while the council initially
rejected the funding mechanism in 2001 by a vote of 8 to 1, a 6 to 3 majority approved the idea two
years later, following an AIM campaign that featured meetings that brought out hundreds of
supporters of the plan.
Todd estimated that Duncan has met with AIM representatives 30 times since the late 1990s.
Duncan said he meets with only one other citizens group -- the NAACP -- as frequently as he does
with AIM.
Council member Phil Andrews (D-Gaithersburg-Rockville) said Progressive Maryland, an advocacy
group that promoted passage of the 2002 "living wage" law that Andrews sponsored, has been as
influential as AIM, although he noted that the group is now focused mainly on statewide issues.
AIM has also backed successful efforts to improve taxicab services, especially for elderly residents,
and to convince the county to offer developers the opportunity to build on some parcels of
county-owned land on the condition that they include affordable units in such projects.
Steele and Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D) are assisting AIM in its effort to convince the federal
government to open a full-service immigration office in Montgomery County to complement the
district office in Baltimore. Because 66 percent of Maryland's foreign-born population lives in
Montgomery and Prince George's counties, AIM and its supporters argue, Washington's Maryland
suburbs need a full-service office to reduce the travel time and disruption for immigrants who are
required to present themselves in Baltimore.
A spokesman for the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services agency of the Department of
Homeland Security, which oversees such offices, indicated that AIM may be reaching too high on
this issue. "It doesn't appear feasible to locate a new office in that part of Maryland," said Bill
Strassberger.
Immigrants in Hawaii and Alaska generally must fly to the nearest full-service immigration office,
Strassberger added, and those in states such as Idaho and Maine must drive several hours each
way.
Influence of Immigrants
The federal government may not see the logic of providing more services for immigrants in
Montgomery, but an AIM-sponsored house meeting in Burtonsville last month made clear where the
organization gets such ideas.
The session brought together 18 people, some from an AIM member congregation, the Church of
the Resurrection in Burtonsville. Most of the meeting's participants were immigrants from
Cameroon, Nigeria, Ethiopia and other African countries. The conversation focused on one
participant's suggestion that the county provide a "welcome center" for new immigrants to provide
referrals to employment opportunities, offer English instruction and advise newcomers on "how to
navigate the system."
(The people at the house meeting were unaware that Montgomery already provides such services at
its Gilchrist Center for Cultural Diversity in Wheaton and, to a lesser extent, at the Upcounty Regional
Services Center in Germantown.)
Resurrection parishioners then brought the gist of the discussion to an AIM "strategy session" at
Cedar Lane Unitarian Universalist Church in Bethesda on Nov. 30, where many other congregations
reported on house meetings of their own. The strategy session yielded a long list of issues,
including health care for the uninsured, eliminating what participants said were ethnic and racial
biases in school testing, and the need to continue helping immigrants.
Laurence A. Froehlich, a member of Kehilat Shalom synagogue in Gaithersburg and an AIM leader,
ran a disciplined, good-natured meeting of 75 or so people that began and ended with prayer.
"For many people," he said, "for thousands, we are the only voice that they have to our political
leadership."
© 2005 The Washington Post Company
FBCO in the News
December 8, 2005
December 8, 2005