David Clohessy
David Clohessy worked for ACORN as a staff organizer from 1980-1988 in Boston, Memphis, St. Louis, Philadelphia and Detroit. In this interview, he describes his progressive politics growing out of a childhood in a conservative family in a conservative part of Missouri. He talks about orgazining in cities across the country, and some of the campaigns he found most signficiant and successful — including those around banks and the CRA. Clohessy remembers how satisfying it felt to build something out of nothing, saying, “…even if it doesn’t last, even if it’s not neat and tidy.” And he cautions organizers today against perfectionism. However, during his time with ACORN, he didn’t always have a clear sense that the work was making a signficiant difference. This changed after he left ACORN, when he had a series of interactions with St. Louis bureaucrats while working on one of Freeman Bosley’s political campaigns, in which they told him how scared they used to be of ACORN. Those experiences made Clohessy beleive that just the existence of ACORN kept decsision-makers more accountable, and that this type of “deterance impact” was important despite being hard to quantify. Furthermore, he shares his belief that hundreds of organizations wouldn’t exist or be doing as effective work today if not for ACORN. Clohessy also describes ACORN’s work culture — the long hours, low-pay, but also the esprit-de-corp. He shares the qualities he saw as making great organizers — like many of the people he admired most in ACORN: confidence, ambition, and the skill to see and seize opportunities right when they pop up. Clohessy talks about racial and gender dynamics within ACORN, as well as the issue of organizer safety. In the end, Clohessy left ACORN in part because he was exhausted and “tired of being dirt poor.” And even though he was no longer with ACORN during the organization’s final years, Clohessy found it too painful to watch. He explains that after his time with ACORN, he spent years involved in PR work, and it was clear to him then that ACORN was missing important PR opportunites. Since working for ACORN, Clohessy has had a signficant activist life with SNAP, the Survivor’s Network of those Abused by Priests, where he served as the executive director and spokesman for more than two decades. In this interview, he talks about how his time at ACORN informed his work with SNAP, in addition to other ways ACORN had lasting effects on his life, including the life-long friends he made during those years and how he feels that his life is richer and more meaninful because of the opportunities he had to work closely with low and moderate-income people, both Black and white.