Join Us

LACCLA organizes buildings and neighborhoods in working-class and historically-oppressed communities of color in Los Angeles. Our goal is not just to fight back against the exploitation and oppression that harm our communities, but to affirmatively build sustainable and accountable institutions in order to cultivate models of the world we want to live in, here and now.

Base Building

An organized community is a safe community, so a central part of our power-building strategy is conducting community outreach and growing our membership base. LACCLA staff and members lead tenants’ rights workshops, door-knocking drives, and phone and text banks. We unionize buildings to form tenant associations and build vibrant, resilient communities that can stand alongside each other in the fight to stay in our homes.

Direct Action

LACCLA leads grassroots campaigns at the direction of our membership to combat the unjust systems that create and perpetuate displacement and gentrification. Members are integrally involved in the planning and execution of our campaigns–whether advocating for new policies to protect and expand tenants’ rights, resisting evictions and unjust living conditions, or demanding social housing, we fight for systemic change from below through direct action.

Participatory Democracy

Central to our vision of a just world are self-determination and direct community engagement. The LACCLA membership base is a decision-making body that guides our organizing work through weekly general meetings and committees. Members collectivize individual struggles, develop strategies for ongoing campaigns, learn together, and support one another through mutual aid. Our meetings are horizontal spaces for active discussion and debate where we practice participatory democracy and community accountability, build leadership skills, and exercise our own agency.

Political Education

Our member-run political education committee works to deepen our analysis of power and systemic injustice. The committee meets to discuss readings from diverse fields including political theory, urban planning, race, gender, and transformative justice, then develops workshops to share with our broader membership and the community at large in order to sharpen our vision for the future as well as our strategies to achieve it.