Wade Rathke

Wade Rathke
File:Acorn founder Wade Rathke in Prague (cropped).JPG Acorn founder Wade Rathke in Prague
Born	(1948-08-05) August 5, 1948 Laramie, Wyoming
Education	Williams College
Occupation	Organizer
Known for	Founder of ACORN
Partner	Beth Butler
Website	WadeRathke.com

Stephen Wade Rathke (born August 5, 1948) is a community and labor activist who founded the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) in 1970 and Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 100 in 1980 (now United Labor Unions Local 100). He was ACORN's chief organizer from its founding in 1970 until June 2, 2008, and continues to organize for the international arm. He is the publisher and editor-in-chief of Social Policy, a quarterly magazine for scholars and activists. The magazine's publishing arm has published four of his books. He is also a radio station manager of KABF (Little Rock), WAMF (New Orleans), and WDSV (Greenville, Mississippi).

Early life and education

Rathke was born in Laramie, Wyoming, to Edmann J. Rathke and Cornelia Ratliff Rathke. He and his younger brother Dale were raised in Colorado and New Orleans, Louisiana, where they attended local schools and graduated from Benjamin Franklin High School.

Rathke attended Williams College, a private liberal arts college in Williamstown, Massachusetts, from 1966 to 1971. While there, Wade organized draft resistance for Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and later organized welfare recipients in Springfield and Boston, Massachusetts for the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO).

ACORN

Founding

Rathke began his career as an organizer for the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO) in Springfield, Massachusetts. After working with the NWRO, he left for Little Rock, Arkansas to found a new organization designed to unite poor and working-class families around a common agenda. As founder and chief organizer of ACORN, Rathke first hired Gary Delgado, among many notable community and labor organizers over the years. They developed a replicable model of "forming membership organizations and developing leaders in low-income neighborhoods -- relying substantially on young middle-class staff working for subsistence wages."

This community organizing initiative in Arkansas eventually developed as the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), the largest organization of lower income and working families in the United States, with almost 500,000 dues-paying families spread across about one-hundred staffed offices in American cities. The Institute for Social Justice has been developed to serve as ACORN's training arm.

The ACORN family of organizations includes radio stations (KNON and KABF), publications, housing development and ownership (ACORN Housing), and a variety of other supports for direct organizing and issue campaigns, such as Project Vote and the Living Wage Resource Center. In the 21st century, ACORN International has 200,000 members and has opened staffed offices in Lima, Peru; Toronto, Ontario; Ottawa, Ontario; Montreal, Quebec; Halifax, Nova Scotia and Vancouver, British Columbia in Canada; San Pedro Sula and Tegucigalpa, Honduras; Bristol, Sheffield, and Newcastle, England; Edinburgh and Glasgow, Scotland; Paris and Grenoble, France; Douala, Cameroon; Nairobi, Kenya; Bengaluru, Delhi, and Mumbai, India; Rome, Italy; Prague, Czech Republic; and in other countries.

Departure

The New York Times reported on July 9, 2008, that Dale Rathke, the brother of ACORN's founder Wade Rathke, was found to have embezzled $948,607.50 from the group and affiliated charitable organizations in 1999 and 2000. Wade learned of the problem when an employee of Citizens Consulting, the accounting firm for ACORN, told him an investigation uncovered inappropriate charges that led to his brother. "Clearly, this was an uncomfortable, conflicting and humiliating situation as far as my family and I were concerned," Wade said, "and so the real decisions on how to handle it had to be made by others." ACORN executives decided to handle it as an internal matter, and did not inform some of the board members, staff or law enforcement. They signed an enforceable restitution agreement with the Rathke family to repay the amount of the embezzlement. After the Rathke family had repaid $210,000, in $30,000 installments, a friend of Wade Rathke, Drummond Pike, purchased the promissory note thereby repaying the remaining debt for Dale Rathke. According to the Times, Wade Rathke "said the decision to keep the matter secret was not made to protect his brother but because word of the embezzlement would have put a 'weapon' into the hands of enemies of Acorn, a liberal group that is a frequent target of conservatives who object to ACORN's often strident advocacy on behalf of low- and moderate-income families and workers." A whistleblower revealed the embezzlement in 2008. On June 2, 2008, Dale Rathke was dismissed, and Wade resigned that same day as ACORN's chief organizer. He continues as chief organizer for ACORN International, Inc.

SEIU Local 100

Rathke is also founder and Chief Organizer of Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 100, which is headquartered in New Orleans and also has chapters in Texas and Arkansas. Founded in 1980 in New Orleans as an independent union of Hyatt employees, the union became part of SEIU in 1984. SEIU Local 100 organizes public sector public workers, including school employees, Head Start, and health care workers, as well as lower-wage private sector workers in the hospitality, janitorial, and other service industries.

Rathke's work in the labor movement includes three terms as Secretary-Treasurer of the Greater New Orleans AFL-CIO. Rathke was the president and co-founder of the SEIU Southern Conference; a member of the International Executive Board of SEIU (1996–2004); and Chief Organizer of the Hotel and Restaurant Organizing Committee (HOTROC) a multi-union organizing project for hospitality workers in New Orleans sponsored by the AFL-CIO and its president, John Sweeney, and from 2004–2008 chief organizer of a multi-pronged effort to organize Walmart workers, including the Walmart workers in Florida and California. In 2009, Local 100 left SEIU and once again became United Labor Unions Local 100.

Rathke and Local 100 were most prominently in the news in the fall of 2017 when they filed charges with the NLRB to prevent Dallas Cowboys’ owner and general manager, Jerry Jones, from threatening his players if they refused to stand for the national anthem. The union withdrew its charge after the NFL said it would not discipline players and Jones.

Other projects

In 2000, Rathke created the Organizers' Forum, which brings together senior organizers in labor and community organizations in dialogues about challenges faced by constituency-based organizations, such as tactical development, organizing new immigrants, using technology, using capital strategies and corporate campaign techniques, or understanding the effects and organizing challenges of globalization. The Organizers' Forum international dialogues have involved more than 300 organizers over the last 10 years. Through visits to Brazil, India, South Africa, Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, Turkey, Russia, Australia, Egypt, Bolivia, Poland, Cameroon, and Morocco, they have helped create a global network of union and community organizers.

In 2011 Rathke purchased the Fair Grinds Coffeehouse in New Orleans. For the previous decade, it had been the only 100% fair trade coffeehouse in the city and was the coffeehouse voted #1 in New Orleans in the readers poll of the weekly Gambit Magazine. Rathke set up the ownership as a low-profit limited liability corporation (L3C) to operate as a "social venture" business, donating profits and available gross revenues to support organizing in developing countries, including South and Central America, from where the coffee is imported. Fair Grinds under Rathke now imports the coffee beans directly from the Port of New Orleans, to benefit local jobs and union workers, and roasts locally as well. Fair Grinds has two locations, one in Faubourg St. John on Ponce de Leon and the other in the Marigny-Bywater area on St. Claude at Elysian Fields.

Rathke publishes and edits the quarterly journal, Social Policy, now entering its 48th year in 2018. The Social Policy Press has also published books on gun control, rural organizing, the history of the community organization, Virginia Organizing, as well as books on ACORN’s role in rebuilding New Orleans after Katrina and the work of many organizations internationally. Social Policy Press is also publishing Rathke’s Nuts and Bolts: ACORN Fundamentals of Organizing in January 2018 that looks at lessons learned in five decades of community and labor organizing.

Radio

Since 2013, Rathke has returned to the 100,000-watt radio station KABF-FM 88.3 as its station manager. In 2015, the Affiliated Media Foundation Movement (AM/FM) won a low-power license for New Orleans which went on the air as WAMF-LP 90.3 in the summer of 2017 under Rathke’s management. In the fall of 2017, WDSV-FM 91.9, a 1,500-watt noncommercial appointed Rathke as station manager during a reorganization of the station. ACORN International’s internet radio station went on the air in January 2018 with programming from all ACORN affiliates, as well as other programming distributed by AM/FM. AM/FM distributes to these stations and others, the Peoples’ Daily News and Chief Organizer Reports that Rathke writes and records daily, as well as his weekly 30-minute interview show, Wade’s World.

Documentary films

A film directed by Nick Taylor and produced by Joey Carey entitled The Organizer was released to festivals in 2017 with a world premier at the New Orleans Film Festival and other festival showings held or scheduled in Woodstock, New York; Cedar City, Utah; Santa Fe, New Mexico; Oxford, Mississippi; Lafayette, Louisiana and elsewhere. The Organizer is a film about Rathke and the work of ACORN from its founding through various struggles and accomplishments to its current international work and Home Savers Campaign. Education screenings of the film are scheduled in January at Springfield College, University of Connecticut at Hartford, and the University of Massachusetts at Boston. In February and March there are screenings scheduled in Bulgaria, Greece, Slovakia, France, England, and Scotland for organizers and activists among others.

Additionally, another documentary, ACORN and the Firestorm, directed by Reuben Atlas was released to festivals in 2017. The film looks at ACORN and its founding and work under Rathke, but its focus is the attack on ACORN by conservatives.

Personal life

Rathke and his partner, Beth Butler, reside in New Orleans, Louisiana.

Publications

• Citizen Wealth: Winning the Campaign to Save Working Families (2009)
• The Battle for the Ninth Ward: ACORN, Rebuilding New Orleans, and the Lessons of Disaster (2011)
• Edited Global Grassroots: Perspectives on International Organizing (2011)
• Nuts and Bolts: The ACORN Fundamentals of Organizing (2018)

External links

• Chief Organizer Blog
• ACORN International
• ACORN
• Tides Foundation
• SEIU Local 100
• Social Policy Magazine
• WSJ Article about Rathke
• Saul ... Time to Step Aside by Drummond Pike, June 25, 2008