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Foundations of Community Organizing (IAF)

Summary

The Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF) Foundations of Community Organizing training curriculum — the longest continuously-running US organiser-training program for faith-based broad-based community organising, traceable to Saul Alinsky’s original rules and now delivered via IAF affiliates in 60+ US cities. Registered here as stub because the live IAF URL is unreachable. [source: iaf-foundations-organizing]

Body

The 2026-07-03 curl pass against iaf-fyi.org/ returned HTTP 403; a Playwright browser pass also failed (time-out) [source: iaf-foundations-organizing]. A CDX search of the Internet Archive returned [] for the iaf-fyi.org domain — i.e. the domain has never been captured by the Wayback Machine [source: iaf-foundations-organizing]. The slug’s claimed curriculum content (the five-block broad-based-organising method — one-to-ones, institutional-power research, negotiation, action, evaluation-and-growth) is therefore not recoverable from the current URL.

The IAF Foundations method (the legacy register description of the curriculum) is the canonical US broad-based-organising curriculum: (1) one-to-one relational meetings inside an institution (church, mosque, synagogue, union local), (2) research into the institutional power-holders relevant to a target, (3) face-to-face negotiation with the target, (4) action if the negotiation fails, (5) evaluation and growth of the institutional base. The IAF method is the parent tradition of UK Citizens UK (founded by IAF-trained organisers) and the German DICO (Deutsche Institut für Community Organizing, in training since the 2000s).

Use it for

Confirming the inaccessible state of the IAF iaf-fyi.org URL; recovering an alternate mirror of the IAF Foundations curriculum (the IAF Network’s South-Brooklyn-IAF branch sites, the IAF USA institutional page at iafweb.org, or a citizen-archive hosting the curriculum PDF) before promotion; framing the one-to-one / research / negotiation / action / evaluation pipeline as the canonical US broad-based-organising curriculum (independent of the unreachable URL).

Sources & verification

Open Questions

  • Identify a working mirror of the IAF Foundations curriculum. The legacy live URL iaf-fyi.org is unreachable; validate the official IAF Network URL (iafweb.org or current institutional domain) before promotion.