History

Action for Grassroots Empowerment and Neighborhood Development Alternatives (AGENDA) was established after the 1992 civil unrest in Los Angeles. That searing moment revealed how thin the civic infrastructure of Los Angeles had grown: many older community organizations had become distant from their neighborhood base and a new generation of youth; service organizations were helpless in the face of mounting structural barriers; government institutions had become ineffectual and unresponsive.

AGENDA was founded to address these problems by pursuing four strategies:

• Building powerful vehicles for those locked out of the decision-making loop to act on their own behalf. Strategic components include: developing effective models for popular education (which demystifies problems, focuses on true causes, and involves people in developing solutions), developing skilled grassroots leadership, and building ongoing democratic organization with an expanding base of social activists.
  
• Democratically developing proactive public policy agendas aimed at moving from the position of defensively responding to reactionary social agendas, to defining the terms of public debate and policy decision-making. Such agendas are rooted in a vision that promotes: alternative economic development models based on social justice, the progressive role of government and use of public capital to solve social inequities, and mechanisms for true corporate accountability.
  
• Constructing strategic alliances at the intersection of racial, class, and single-issue efforts. We believe this is where new formations of progressive power can move beyond short-lived tactical coalitions and become sustained and powerful multi-issue movements that can win real systemic social change.
  
• Organizing innovative public policy campaigns, which ignite broad social movements, win structural change, and begin to realign power relationships in this society towards authentic democracy and justice.

AGENDA’s victories include: the redirection of federal dollars to create independent youth programs in South LA; community-defined economic development standards for South LA which were agreed to by Rebuild-LA; and implementing nationally recognized models for increasing voter participation in poor communities, including a demonstrated 6% increase in voter turnout in targeted sections of South LA in the November 2000 election.