Keeping the Faith on Social Issues

While AIM and IAF affiliates seem on the surface to mix religion and politics, "they are pretty relentless that they are not trying to pursue a religious agenda," said Mark R. Warren, an associate professor of education at Harvard University and the author of a 2001 book on an IAF affiliate in Texas. "Faith institutions are arguably our strongest set of institutions in society, independent of government and independent of business."

'The Agenda Is the Person'

Mark Fraley, who served as AIM's lead organizer from 1998 to mid-2005, held hundreds of individual and house meetings to build AIM, each centering on some key questions: What's important to you? What values do you hold? What makes you angry? These discussions, he said, help build an organization that can be political without being partisan and yield an agenda that closely reflects its constituents' priorities. "The agenda is the person," Fraley said.

The IAF has 56 affiliates in the United States, Europe and Canada. Most of the groups are based in cities -- including Baltimore and the District -- although a handful reach into suburbia. AIM, said Jonathan Lange, a member of the IAF's national staff, is "very suburban" in that it wasn't founded as an adjunct to an urban affiliate. In the Washington area, the IAF is in the early stages of creating new affiliates in Howard County and Northern Virginia, Lange said.

AIM's budget for 2005 is $227,500, which pays the salaries of two organizers and other costs. The money comes from congregations, which pay 1 percent of their operating budgets up to a limit of $10,000, and from nongovernmental grants. "You can't hold politicians accountable if they're paying your salary," Glassman said.

The organization emphasizes developing productive relationships with elected leaders and government officials. Duncan said he embraced AIM from its early days in the late 1990s. "Faith-based advocates for social justice is what we need more of in our county," he said.

"I don't find [AIM] as negative or hostile or accusatory as some of the other groups sometimes are," said Elizabeth B. Davison, Montgomery's director of housing and community affairs.

Duncan's support led to some of AIM's most concrete successes: a council vote in 2001 to double the funding, to $15 million, for Montgomery's Housing Initiative Fund, which is used primarily to renovate and improve the county's affordable housing stock. That was followed in 2003 by a council vote to dedicate 2.5 percent of the county's property-tax revenue to support the fund each year.

Duncan pursued the increased funding at AIM's urging. Saralee S. Todd, a Duncan adviser, said, "It was AIM that brought the concept [of the dedicated funding] to Doug." And while the council initially rejected the funding mechanism in 2001 by a vote of 8 to 1, a 6 to 3 majority approved the idea two years later, following an AIM campaign that featured meetings that brought out hundreds of supporters of the plan.

Todd estimated that Duncan has met with AIM representatives 30 times since the late 1990s. Duncan said he meets with only one other citizens group -- the NAACP -- as frequently as he does with AIM.

Council member Phil Andrews (D-Gaithersburg-Rockville) said Progressive Maryland, an advocacy group that promoted passage of the 2002 "living wage" law that Andrews sponsored, has been as influential as AIM, although he noted that the group is now focused mainly on statewide issues.

AIM has also backed successful efforts to improve taxicab services, especially for elderly residents, and to convince the county to offer developers the opportunity to build on some parcels of county-owned land on the condition that they include affordable units in such projects.

Steele and Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D) are assisting AIM in its effort to convince the federal government to open a full-service immigration office in Montgomery County to complement the district office in Baltimore. Because 66 percent of Maryland's foreign-born population lives in Montgomery and Prince George's counties, AIM and its supporters argue, Washington's Maryland suburbs need a full-service office to reduce the travel time and disruption for immigrants who are required to present themselves in Baltimore.