Citizen Wealth

“No one knows better than Wade Rathke how to organize everyday Americans to win economic and political power. Now he has taken his fourty years of hard-won experience and given us the book and the understanding we need to turn around America and lay the foundation for a sustainable economy for our future.” –Stewart Acuff, Director of Organizing, AFL-CIO “This is one of those rare books that magically appear when desperately needed. Wade Rathke describes an approach that has worked to build a better life for literally millions and does not depend on the outcome of the last election. I have learned so much from Wade Rathke that has helped me win critical battles, and so can you.” –Michael Kieschnick, President and cofounder, Working Assets “Wade Rathke shares insights and experiences from his fourty years of organizing and offers a grassroots strategy to combat economic injustice. Invaluable!” —Robert Fisher, Professor of Community Organization, University of Connecticut, and author of Let the People Decide “Citizen Wealth takes us on a remarkable journey through our recent ‘gilded age,’ witnessing the myriad efforts of ACORN and many others to counter the sly, often dishonest, ways that unscrupulous business interests exploit low and moderate-income people. But Rathke doesn’t fall into polemics; instead, he tells stories—and damn good ones—about how activists and businesses worked out win-win partnerships that helped strengthen our communities.” —Drummond Pike, CEO, Tides Foundation

Wade Rathke first began organizing more than forty years ago when he dropped out of college to organize against the Vietnam War. Later he organized welfare recipients in Massachusetts, first in Springfield and then statewide from Boston, before leaving for Arkansas to found ACORN in Little Rock in mid-June 1970. A decade later, Wade added labor organizing to his experiences when he and other organizers responded to issues that ACORN members were having in their workplaces, whether home health workers, hotel workers, or fast food workers, and moved to New Orleans to build independent unions that later merged into the Service Employees International Union in 1984.The common themes of these decades as a welfare rights organizer, community organizer, and labor organizer have been how to unite people at the bottom income levels around their issues to build sufficient power so that they could impact their lives, improve their communities, and change the direction of their country. Dealing with income and assets has been a constant theme of Wade’s organizing, no matter what the venue or vehicle, and he has been delighted to pull all of these strands of his experience together in writing Citizen Wealth. For a generation Wade has been recognized as perhaps the premier organizer of his generation, making this book something of a milestone in that journey.

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