Idaho Citizen's Network
Roger Sherman, Executive Director
904 W. Fort St., PO Box 1927
Boise, Idaho 83701
(208) 385-9146

From a stop sign or street light in rural Burley to a statewide single-payer health plan, if community organizing is needed in Idaho, the Idaho Citizen's Network will almost certainly be there to organize it.

Operating out of a cozy old house with a shady veranda just a few blocks away from the state capitol, ICN mobilizes 25,000 dues-paying members in four chapters around the state, in Boise, Idaho Falls, Coeur d'Alene and Kellogg, a tiny town in the depressed silver-mining country near the Montana border.

ICN credits its diversity, and its statewide reach, to its origins. It descends from three disparate groups that formed during the early '80s: The Idaho Neighbors Network, which formed to deal with disability rights, women's welfare issues and neighborhood problems in Burley; Idaho Fair Share, a statewide organization involved initially in utility-rate issues; and the Idaho Disabilities Coalition, a Burley-based organization of disabled people fighting for accessibility. The three groups formed a coalition in 1987 to work jointly on organizing around health-care issues, and not long afterward formally merged into ICN.

With a staff of eight, plus a larger group of fund-raising and organizing canvassers, ICN operates with a $200,000 annual budget; it continues diverse organizing efforts traceable back to its origins, including such local efforts as Superfund clean-up initiatives in lead-contaminated Kellogg and a sit-in by wheelchair riders to protest the inaccessible city hall in Burley, an effort that ultimately forced construction of a new city building. ICN fought legislative cuts in Medicaid, and got an unprecedented $12 million allocated to finance personal-care attendants for in-home services for disabled people, helping them gain independence and avoid institutionalization in nursing homes.

Among its current major projects are IDAHEALTH, a proposed single-payer health plan; while it had no immediate hope for passage, the organization viewed the plan and its active support by a broad coalition toward setting terms for a new agenda. The organization has also won funding and is well under way toward setting up a worker-owned cooperative of in-home personal attendants to help disabled people with daily needs.

"A lot of our stuff is traditional community organizing, just get down and do it," Sherman says. "We have some fun, and sometimes it's tough sledding."

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