COMMUNITY ORGANIZING

Since 1980, APAC has organized with resident homeowners to identify community issues, unite residents around a common vision, and develop powerful leaders who can influence decision makers, set the agenda, and win real changes for their community.

Manufactured homeowners around the state are organizing for justice. For far too long residents have been treated as second-class citizens by public officials, businesses, park owners, and the media. The results are park closings, deteriorating living conditions, and the all too familiar stereotypes used to marginalize our communities.

Park owners, developers, and governments have deeply rooted institutional power that they use to promote their values, which include profit as a benefit in itself, and notions of "progress" dictated by the “highest and best use” of land. The resulting state of manufactured home parks is no accident. Manufactured homeowners are organizing around a clear and different set of values: family, home, community, justice, and equality.

In order to win effective changes, we need to build a powerful movement with manufactured homeowners at the helm creating a vehicle for their own social, economic, and political power. We need to promote our values and build our power by organizing people, ideas, and actions. We need to stop the portrayal of residents as victims, and confront the ideas, policies, and practices that are causing their problems.

Recently, homeowners have organized with APAC to:

  • Stop abusive management practices
  • Prevent the adoption of illegal park rules
  • Improve the health and safety of their park communities
  • Require either the repair or replacement of storm shelters
  • Purchase their park communities
  • Prevent displacement due to highway expansions
  • Promote greater access to public transit
  • Elect their leaders to city council

To find out more about community organizing refer to APAC's Organizing Manual, click on the links below, or call and talk with one of our staff organizers.