Katelyn Johnson
Katelyn Johnson joined ACORN Chicago/Illinois as an organizer directly out of college in 2004. She held many organizer titles, but primarily was the Education Organizer. Beginning with the Lawndale Restoration Campaign, she organized, door-knocked and led direct actions for housing and big box campaigns in her 2 1/2 years with ACORN. She left ACORN to take care of her ill mother, yet returned to Chicago in 2009 to serve as Organizer then Executive Director with ACTION NOW through 2019. Currently, she is the Executive Director of the Black Liberation and Reparations coalition Blackroots Alliance in Chicago. She credits ACORN’s successful door-knocking efforts that built trusted relationships with community members as the key to the organizations’ many successes and development of leaders within low-income communities of color. She specifically discusses door knocking tactics, relationship building, coalition building (of which she credits Madeline Talbott and her team for creating the foundation for coalition organizing that continues with strength in Chicago), and the difference between ACORN and it’s Chicago successor, ACTION NOW. While she encountered no sexism or racism at the local level, she does address racial tokenism/racism she and other Black organizers faced from the national, predominantly white male leadership.