Together Louisiana: Mission & Vision

Together Baton Rouge is a 501(c)3 non-profit organization founded in 2008 that has 3 primary goals: “to build relationships across our community based on trust and a willingness to listen to each other, to equip our members and leadership with skills and practices to get results, and to achieve change on concrete issues as part of our common call to justice” (Together Baton Rouge 2022). 

Together Baton Rouge is part of the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF), which also has projects in New Orleans, Monroe, Shreveport-Bossier, Alexandria, and the Louisiana Delta, as well as other cities across the United States, Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom, and Germany. There is also the state-wide Together Louisiana, which, with a network of over 250 religious congregations and civic organizations, including those that make up Together Baton Rouge and Together New Orleans, is one of the largest grassroots organizations in Louisiania’s history. Together Louisiana’s mission is to provide opportunities for faith and community-based organizations to “develop the leadership capacity of their members and affect change on a larger scale than they could alone” (Together Louisiana). Issues they work on include tax fairness, healthcare access, disaster recovery, access to healthy food, workforce development, criminal justice reform and infrastructure and transportation development. 

IAF was founded in 1940 by community activist and political theorist Saul David Alinsky. In the 1960s, AIF was focused on training community organizers and supporting organizing groups like Community Service Organization in California, and the Rochester Area Churches and Black civil rights leaders in Rochester, New York. In 1969, Alinsky and IAF members organized a Campaign Against Pollution in Chicago (Horwitt 1989). He died in 1972. Following Alisnky’s death, his community-organizing methods have continued to be applied across different cities, states, and counties. In France, Alinsky’s approach to community organizing inspired the creation of Grenoble’s Alliance Citoyenne (Citizens Alliance), and similar initiatives in Rennes in 2014 and in Lyon in 2019 (Laurent 2017). Leaders of the Alliance Citoyenne founded the Alinsky Institute in October 2017 as a think tank and training organization to promote civic engagement in blue-collar and immigrant suburbs, known as banlieues (Talpin 2017). Alinsky was also a source of inspiration for the Occupy movement (Miller 2014).