Building power
For Black and Brown Working Class Detroiters.
About us
Detroit Action is the marriage of the Detroit Action Commonwealth and Good Jobs Now. Relaunched with the support of the Center for Popular Democracy and the Alliance For Youth Action in 2019, Detroit Action Action seeks to be a union for Black and Brown Michiganders to build power and defend our communities.
Founded in early 2008 at a soup kitchen on Detroit’s East Side, Detroit Action Commonwealth (DAC) was a nonpartisan, 501(c)(3) membership organization that develops individual and collective power to challenge the root causes of poverty, homelessness, and injustice. Through a mixture of leadership development, issue advocacy, and service provision, the Detroit Action addresses issues that affect members, their families, and the broader community, including conditions in homeless shelters, acquiring personal identification and birth records, interacting with the criminal justice system, housing, transportation, health care, and employment.
Good Jobs Now (GJN), was an electorally-focused 501(c)(4) launched in 2011 with support from SEIU’s Fight for a Fair Economy Campaign (FFE). FFE campaigns invested resources in 16 cities across the country to shift the narrative about income inequality in this country and to push the daily struggles of working people to the forefront of political decision-making.
Since its relaunch in 2019, DA has established itself as a year-round community organizing force by and for Detroiters with an eye towards statewide power.
Our mission
Our mission is to build the power of individuals and families to challenge the root cause of poverty, advance justice, and promote human development through neighborhood-driven community organizing and civic engagement. We believe in creating a just world where everyone has housing, healthcare, quality education, and a live-able environment.
Our model
To build an organization that serves as our members’ and staff’s political home. We believe in a Detroit Action where we can learn, build relationships and create the type of community that we deserve. Regardless of immigration status, race, or gender identity, all can find safety, support, and solidarity here. Everyone who comes through our doors with an individual story of abuse and exploitation finds that they are not alone – that in collectivizing our experiences and voices, we can build the power to change not just one case, but entire systems.
OUR ORGANIZING MODEL INTEGRATES
Deep Community Organizing
To transform the systems and power structures impacting our communities.
Key Survival Services
To tackle discrimination, abuse and poverty and their impact on the lives of Detroiters.
Policy Reform & Innovation
To make our democracy truly accountable to all of us by rewriting unjust rules and practices.
Transformative Political Innovation & Training
To develop members ability and capacity to lead our organization, our movement, and our community.
Celebrations of Culture & Life
That deepen relationships and rebuilds the bonds of community.
Radical Civic Engagement
To shape our electorate and gain the type of wins necessary to wield power.
Our values
We are an organization that believes in placing its values at the center of its organizing and campaigns. Here are the organization’s guiding values and principles:
- Centering the most impacted
- Leaderful movements
- Multiple strategies for power
- Embracing Radical Politics
- Holistic organizing
- Intersectionality and Interdependence
- Anti-capitalist/anti-racism
- Pan-Africanism and Internationalism
- Abolition
- Radical Love and Tenderness