History of Our Communities

At the height of the industrial age, the Naugatuck Valley of Connecticut was the center of the world's brass industry, the site of Seth Thomas' clockworks, Charles Goodyear's first experiments vulcanizing rubber, and Gail Borden's first successful efforts in evaporating milk. The Merrimack Valley of Massachusetts, containing two of the first planned industrial cities in the nation, Lowell and Lawrence, was famous as a center of textile and woolen manufacturing for over l25 years. Manchester and Nashua, New Hampshire also sited on the Merrimack River, contained huge textile mills powered by the river's waters. The Pioneer Valley, in western Massachusetts, had hundreds of paper, firearms, and machine tool manufacturing companies. Central Falls, Pawtucket and Providence, Rhode Island was the home of jewelry, auto parts, and other manufacturing companies, as well as the Slater Mill in Pawtucket, one of the earliest factories in the nation.

In a relatively brief period of time, these areas suffered a tremendous loss of skilled and semi-skilled, union-represented jobs which paid wages allowing working families to save, buy homes, and put children through college. The decline of manufacturing jobs in the Merrimack Valley began with the move of the mills to the South between 1920 and 1950. The Naugatuck Valley, Pioneer Valley and Rhode Island suffered the heaviest loss of jobs between 1975 and 1990 through the acquisition of local industrial firms by conglomerates, who rarely invested in them, and who then sold them or shut them down in the flurry of leveraged buy-outs and corporate raiding which dominated this period.

Those losing jobs were both the sons and daughters of the original European immigrants who worked in these factories, and the more recent immigrants to these industrial areas from Latin and Central America, and Southeast Asia. The latter had begun to arrive during periods of turmoil in their native countries and relatively brief periods of industrial revival in our valleys. This revival was centered in the massive concentration in Southern New England of firms engaged in military production during the Vietnam War and the final years of the Cold War, and for a short time in the high tech firms of the Merrimack Valley

Origins of IVP Model

In 1983, with the encouragement of an experienced organizer, leaders in one of these valleys, the Naugatuck Valley, organized the Naugatuck Valley Project (NVP), the first of the InterValley Project (IVP) organizations.

From the beginning NVP was designed to take the best elements of institutionally-based, multi-issue citizen organizing and extend them further into new areas of work and new models of organizing. The organizers of the NVP wanted to enable its members to organize effectively around workplace as well as community issues, on a proactive and not just a reactive basis, seizing opportunities to save, stabilize and create jobs, as well as public and private investment for affordable housing, and critical public services.

To do this NVP's organizers created an organization that was regional (to deal with the regional nature of employment) and coalitional (with religious congregations at their heart, but also including labor union locals, tenant, and community organizations).

Most importantly, they built a community organization which combined citizen action and democratic economic development strategies. By "democratic economic development strategies" they meant the creation of new economic entities-such as worker-owned companies, limited equity/sweat equity cooperative housing developments, and community land trusts-which are themselves owned and controlled by their members.

They found this form of development inherently valuable because it preserves assets for future generations, and valuable as well because it's democratic nature is a better fit with the democratically-controlled parent citizen's organization they were organizing.

As NVP's founding organizers were asked to assist other regions in Southern New England build similar organizations, NVP's model became the IVP model of organizing and development, a model which might be called "democratic economic organizing."

Formalization of IVP

In 1995 these original four organizations decided to formalize their relationship with each other and combine efforts in common issue and economic development organizing, joint leadership and staff development, and building a network.

By June 1997, IVP members had created a board of directors, and hired Kenneth Galdston as the IVP's first full-time Director/Organizer. Galdston had played a key role in the creation of each of these organizations, as the founding organizer of NVP and MVP, and as an advisor and supervising organizer in the creation of RIOP and PVP, while serving as MVP Staff Director/Lead Organizer.

Since 1997 we have developed the IVP itself as a network, and taken advantage of this new link to increase the effectiveness of IVP organizations.