Iowa Citizens For Community Improvement (CCI)
Joe Fagan, executive director
1607 E. Grand Ave.
Des Moines, Iowa 50316
(515) 266-5213

Founded by a coalition of church groups in Waterloo, Iowa, in 1975, CCI got its start as a multi-issue urban community-organizing group, focusing on neighborhood improvement in the poorer sections of the city with Iowa's largest black minority. With a Campaign for Human Development grant, CCI soon established similar chapters in Des Moines and Council Bluffs, taking on a statewide focus, and later added a family-farm organizing program based in Des Moines.

Among its urban programs, CCI in Des Moines is working on an exciting model, a stringent oversight and regulation program for absentee landlords called "Full Court Press." Under this measure, all absentee landlords would be rated on the basis of an extensive list of criteria having to to with their record for keeping property up to code and resolving tenant complaints. Landlords that fail to make a passing score would be subject to stringent codes and frequent inspections, and their progress toward correction would be monitored by government and the public.

In the farm organizing area, CCI has been working since 1981 on legislation packages aimed at easing the farm crisis "squeeze" on farmers caught between low agricultural income and the high cost of credit for land and farming equipment and supplies.

In 1985, against heavy odds, CCI got a controversial "minimum farm-price bill," placing a floor price under state agricultural prices, through both houses of the legislature, only to have it vetoed by conservative Republican Gov. Terry Branstad.

In the process, however, it developed an extremely effective and simple organizing technique: Identifying the home towns and counties of all members of the state House and Senate agriculture committees, it emphasized organizing in those counties. With scores of local-voting farmers bombarding every committee member with well-informed calls and letters, CCI brought a large majority of committee members firmly into its camp, guaranteeing it a fair hearing on all its legislation.

Its most effective model, however, and one that farm organizations all over the Midwest are studying, has been the extension of the Community Reinvestment Act's (CRA) power into rural America. Traditionally, inner-city organizations have used CRA to compel banks to deliver services to poor urban communities. But by successfully defining the act's requirement that banks "meet the credit needs of the local community" to incorporate farm regions, CCI has been able to persuade Iowa's three largest bank holding companies (Norwest, Firstar and Brenton) to add many provisions for low- to moderate-income farmers. Norwest alone set aside more than $13 million for low-interest loans to new borrowers who own small farms, and Fagan estimates that $47 million in new loans has become available to family farmers in the past five years as a result of the CRA actions. Under the group's standard CRA agreement, rural banks have agreed to make loans with interest rates and down payments "as low as possible" and to use government farm-credit programs to help farmers get better terms on loans. The banks agree to make these commitments known through advertising and other active outreach, and to submit to a CCI review process and provide loan statistics at regular meetings.

In addition to the $47 million in verifiable loans, Fagan points to another hopeful statistic: Before Norwest signed the CRA agreement, only 40 percent of its farm loans were going to people with a net worth of $150,000 or less. Now, 60 percent are.

CCI is also working on sustainable-agriculture efforts, particularly in the area of ground water and well water polluted by nitrates and pesticides. Through one-on-one organizing and outreach through FFA and vocational-education classes in Iowa high schools, CCI is using that evidence to persuade farmers to use low-chemical agricultural practices. It has sponsored many workshops, and evolved a particularly effective model called "farmer to farmer workshops" in which CCI-trained farmers who believe in sustainable agriculture hold workshops for other farmers. Then, in a slight twist, discovering that country banks were reluctant to lend money for untried sustainable techniques, CCI arranged "farmer-to-banker" programs, with successful farmers showing bankers what they had done and how they did it.

All the feature stories on @GRASS-ROOTS.ORG's pages are reported and written by Robin Garr, a prize-winning journalist who has visited more than 500 innovative grassroots programs in all 50 states since 1990.

Browse his book, Reinvesting In America, at Amazon.com.

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