WIN OVERVIEW

Washington Interfaith Network (WIN), founded in 1996, is a broad-based, multi-racial, multi-faith, strictly non-partisan, District-wide citizens’ power organization rooted in local congregations and associations. WIN is committed to training and developing neighborhood leaders, addressing community issues, and holding elected and corporate officials accountable in Washington, DC. WIN’s 45 dues-paying members represent 25,000 families in every section of the District and reflect its theological, racial, geographic, and economic diversity.

WIN seeks to create long-term power through a broad and united front of organized institutions, organized people, and organized money–acting consistently and persistently for change on multiple issues at the neighborhood, regional, national, and city-wide levels. WIN engages leaders across the divides of race, culture, income, faith, and neighborhood to initiate public action on their issues (e.g., affordable housing, public safety, youth, etc.) and to partner with and hold the government and corporate sectors accountable for addressing these issues.

WIN accomplishes this through institutional organizing, which entails:

• Developing core organizing teams in member institutions, who are trained to identify new leaders and surface issues for potential action;

• House-meeting campaigns to develop relationships, identify leaders and issues and develop a constituency of people willing to do the work necessary to take public action;

• Research Actions to develop, among a broad group of leaders, the knowledge and expertise around an issue to make action effective and meaningful;

• Action, bringing public pressure to bear on the person or persons with authority to decide for a specific change on a specific issue; and

• Evaluation assesses what leaders have learned from their experience to help them grow as public leaders and inform future organizing.

• Leadership Development & Training,   identifying, training, and engaging hundreds of DC leaders each year to take action on issues that affect their lives. WIN believes in the Iron Rule: “Never do for others what they can do for themselves, never.”

• Ownership. WIN member organizations and volunteer leaders do the work of WIN—organizing, public negotiation, issue identification, strategy development, and ratification. Organizers are teachers. WIN leaders give thousands of volunteer hours per year that produce a significant change in DC. They support the organization with membership dues, Minimum dues: of $2,500, and Maximum dues: of $25,000 to support WIN.  Individual WIN leaders and supporters also make individual voluntary monetary contributions as well.

WIN is also supported financially by national and local businesses, foundations, individuals, and other grantors who recognize the unique service WIN provides the Washington, DC, area.  WIN is registered in DC as a not-for-profit corporation and designated by the US Internal Revenue Service as a 501(c)(3) organization for income tax purposes.  WIN is entirely non-partisan, supports no party or candidate, and accepts no financial support from any level of government for its operations.