ADP's Mission
The Alliance to Develop Power, (formerly Anti–Displacement Project) based in the three counties of Western Massachusetts, has undertaken a set of bold initiatives in community organizing, civic engagement, cooperative economic development, and community building activities.
ADP has instituted a model that prioritizes leadership development, cooperative principles, and moving a membership into action, while simultaneously winning major policy reforms, preserving thousands of units of housing, developing community-owned businesses, and operating the region’s only membership based low wage and immigrant worker center affiliated with the local and national AFL–CIO.
We recognize that it is difficult—if not impossible—for people to work for social and economic justice when their immediate needs for food, housing, and employment are unmet, and that low income individuals are also isolated from institutions that traditionally connect people to broader society. ADP’s work to establish and promote cooperative economic development and civic engagement is a vehicle to bridge these gaps:
- to provide low income people with basic necessities through institutions that they own and direct;
- to foster a sense of responsibility for others in a community focused on building its power;
- and to serve as a mediating institution for the thousands of people whose poverty cuts them off from civic life.
The inherent dignity in self–determination drives all of our work—the way that we organize, the issues around which our members engage, and the operating principles that govern the cooperative businesses we launch. We seek to be a model for the broader adoption of these practices.
