The challenge

Two decades ago, the Arlandria neighborhood of Alexandria, Va. began its path to gentrification, prompting the eviction of many low-income African-American and Latino tenants. The stock of affordable housing was shrinking; so was the pace of housing improvements. Those were the currents that led to the founding of TWSC in 1987.

In recent decades, Northern Virginia has become home to increasing numbers of immigrants from Latin America, East Africa, the Middle East, and East and South Asia. These residents, together with their African-American neighbors, face the same problems finding affordable housing, health care, child care and good jobs. Yet these communities often feel separated and marginalized by their different cultures, languages, and approaches to social change.


Seeds of commitment

Sheryl Bell is African-American; Jon Liss is white; and Silvia Portillo, Edgar Rivera, and María Amalia Ruiz are Latinos from El Salvador. They are united, however, by one shared vision: fighting what they call “Jim Crow II”—meaning discrimination against low-income people, especially immigrants. “Many people, including African-Americans and new immigrants, are still living with the legacy of slavery—and they are still learning their rights,” they write.


Accomplishments

The Tenants’ and Workers’ Support Committee (TWSC) of Northern Virginia was born in the mid-1980s as a community effort to halt mass evictions in Alexandria. Through a decade of vision, persistence and organizing, TWSC helped establish a 282-unit housing development in 1996. Called the Arlandria-Chirilagua Housing Cooperative, it is valued today at $15 million and has become a stepping-stone to individual home ownership for dozens of residents, many of them Salvadoran. In five years, the cooperative’s monthly charges have risen only 10 percent while average area rents have nearly doubled, forcing hundreds of residents out.

Of course housing is only one of several pressing needs for TWSC’s client population. So the organization’s leaders have broadened their focus to include community organizing and school reform access to health care and living-wage jobs, and labor organizing in the hotel, child-care and taxi industries. The TWSC has seen success in these endeavors, helping to unionize the first hotel in Virginia in nearly 20 years, winning the state’s first Living Wage law, organizing municipal home child-care providers in Alexandria, and winning workers back wages and wage increases.

Along the way, the organization has worked with hospitals to forgive or reduce health-care debts carried by low-income families with little means to pay them and has helped expand health-care coverage for more than 1,000 uninsured residents. Today, the TWSC is the largest, predominantly-immigrant, grassroots organization in Virginia. It has six chapters, three issue-based organizing committees, and over 1,000 members and supporters.


Their Leadership style

Several of TWSC’s leaders started out as rank-and-file members of the organization. Today, Bell, Liss, Portillo, Rivera and Ruiz all honor those humble origins with their commitment to help other community members ascend to leadership in their campaign for social and economic justice. In terms of style, the TWSC leadership approach does not “‘bring in’ the low-income community for ‘consultation’ but develops the leadership of community members,” says one TWSC team member.

The leaders also never stop building their base. They have mobilized thousands in neighborhoods across Northern Virginia by, as they describe, “knocking on doors, talking to people, being on call, affecting and respecting people as they are.” En route, they quote African liberation fighter Amilcar Cabral, a major figure in the struggle against colonial rule in Africa: “Promise no easy victories, tell no lies.”


The future

TWSC’s leaders say they will continue to pursue their vision of economic justice. They are pushing local officials to build a multi-purpose community center, to provide affordable health services, after-school programs, and job training. TWSC will also continue to focus on child care in general, together with better treatment of providers.

They plan to launch large-scale union-organizing initiatives in coming years. “We must continue to seek what can be done together, across the differences of race and nationality—Latino, Asian, White and African-American—so that we have a voice and so that we have greater access to the resources that make life possible: health care, education, housing, and employment,” the leaders write.


More about Bell, Liss, Portillo, Rivera, Ruiz and TWSC

“Sheryl, Jon, Silvia, Edgar, and María Amalia are tenacious, in for the long haul and able to regroup and find their way back in the door.”
— Joyce Woodson, Alexandria, Va., City Councilwoman

“TWSC is rooted within its membership and specific constituencies. As a result, unlike many nonprofits, this organization is very much in touch. When you go to Alexandria, you encounter the presence of this organization. They are viewed as a significant social force.”
— Bill Fletcher, Jr., President, TransAfrica Forum, Washington, DC