Our Organizing

OUR ORGANIZING

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.

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.

Tenants can join our base by attending a LACCLA meeting. Meetings are held every Wednesday from 6:30-8:30 p.m. at 346 S. Gless St, Los Angeles, CA 90033. Meetings are held principally in Spanish, with English translation.

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.

Our successful campaigns have included winning rent control for unincorporated areas of Los Angeles County, winning a tenant anti-harassment ordinance for the city of Los Angeles, passing an eviction moratorium during the COVID-19 pandemic, and eliminating renovictions in Los Angeles, protecting vulnerable tenants from displacement.

COLLECTIVE DEFENSE

Tenants facing eviction often face multiple crises: one one hand they must navigate the legal system to fight for their right to stay in their home, on the other they must fight against common narratives and pressure from the court, and even sometimes their own attorneys, that they must accept settlement offers to move. As tenant organizers, we know that often there is no option but to fight to stay: rents are too high and we deserve stability and safety in our homes and to not be displaced.

LACCLA’s Collective Defense committee meets regularly for tenants facing eviction. The committee utilizes LACCLA’s Collective Defense materials, as well as peer-to-peer support and coaching to empower tenants navigating an eviction to face their landlords in court and to refuse to back down in the face of immense pressure to move.

Political education

Our member-run committees work to deepen our analysis of power and systemic injustice. The committees meet to discuss readings from diverse fields including political theory, urban planning, race, gender, and transformative justice, then develop 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.

KNOW YOUR RIGHTS

LACCLA conducts know your rights workshops about tenant rights and the eviction process. To find out if LACCLA is currently offering any workshops and to register for a workshop, go to the Stay Housed LA website.

SUPPORT US

We are a 501(c)(3): your donation is tax deductible and will directly support our organizing and free legal work.

With support from:

346 S. Gless St.,

Los Angeles, CA 90033

LACCLA IS A NON-PROFIT, TAX-EXEMPT UNDER SECTION 501(C)(3) OF THE INTERNAL REVENUE CODE.