Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement (CCI) has many reasons to celebrate – they have thrived as a powerbuilding organization in a deep-red, rural heartland state for five decades!
In July, CCI’s members gathered for two days to celebrate their 50th anniversary as an organization, which was not only a look back at all they have achieved, but a look forward at the fights ahead.
“It was a jam-packed two days of community, information, inspiration, and hope,” said Lisa Whelan, CCI’s executive director. “We’re really committed to the fundamentals of community organizing – to building people power, to making sure everyone has a voice and that voice is heard. This was our opportunity to really demonstrate that, and recommit for the next fifty years.”
Whelan, a social worker who got her start in organizing as an intern for National People’s Action cofounder Shel Trapp in Chicago, has organized with CCI since 2015, and took over as executive director in 2023 from Hugh Espey. Espey organized with CCI for 45 of its fifty years, joining the organization as a teenager, then serving as executive director for more than two decades.
At the event, Espey spoke on a panel with Juanita Lewis, the board chair of People’s Action, Barb Kalbach, who organized with her neighbors to stop the building of a mega-sow factory farm in 2002, and Misty Rebik, an Iowa native who got her start as an organizer at CCI in 2010, and now serves as Chief of Staff to U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders.
Additional highlights from the event included an NPA-style parade led by a marching band, to the strains of ‘When CCI Comes Marching In,” a wall of reflections, and comments by Shundrea Trotty, a former CCI youth organizer who joined the organization as a teenager in the 1990s,
First founded in Waterloo, Iowa by four priests in the rectory of St. Joseph’s Catholic Church, CCI expanded across the state in the 1970s and 1980s, founding chapters in Cedar Rapids, Council Bluffs and Des Moines, Dubuque and Sioux City. One of their first initiatives – a Peoples Community Health Clinic in Waterloo, started in the basement of a church, is going strong five decades later, with its own permanent location, serving patients in nine languages.
As a founding member organization of the National People’s Action and then People’s Action networks, CCI’s members have played critical roles in the national fights to end bank redlining, racial discrimination and predatory lending, and to build solidarity between rural and urban populations, tasks that have become even more relevant amidst the rise of white nationalism.
“A good organizer sees the good, and the potential, in all people,” said Whelan. “So we’re doubling down on organizing in rural areas and small towns – because if we don’t, we know who will.”
Critical to CCI’s ongoing success is their ability to identify, and bring people together around issues that cut across race, class and identity – such as in their current Public Schools Strong campaign, one of the focal points of the two-day event. Iowa currently has a school voucher system, which saps funding from public education.
“People are angry across the political spectrum about it,” said Whelan. “And when people are talking about it and saying we need to stand up and fund our public schools, those candidates are winning.”