Tenant Organizing

Housing is not a commodity. It is a human right. Yet across the Flint Hills region — as in communities throughout the United States — tenants face rising rents, unsafe living conditions, retaliatory landlords, and a legal and political system that consistently prioritizes property ownership over human need. Flint Hills Tenants United (FHTU) is our chapter's response to that reality: a tenant-led organizing initiative committed to building working-class power from the ground up, one building and one block at a time.

FHTU is grounded in the union federation model — the understanding that durable tenant power requires more than isolated campaigns or reactive advocacy. We work to build lasting tenant unions within apartment complexes and housing communities that can federate together, sharing resources, coordinating tactics, and presenting a unified front against landlord exploitation. The Tenant Union Federation, the national body whose model informs our approach, describes this work plainly: organizing tenants to wield power at a massive scale, to bargain for tenant protections, to disrupt the flow of capital to those who commodify our homes, and to establish tenants as a political and economic class that cannot be ignored. That is the vision we are building toward, here in the Flint Hills.

The organizers behind FHTU have actively been preparing for this work. Chapter members completed extensive training through DSA's Housing Justice Commission, including the Emergency Tenant Organizing Committee (ETOC) program — a national initiative launched in 2022 to promote the formation of militant, autonomous tenant unions through tenant-to-tenant training and mentorship. ETOC's curriculum covers the fundamentals of building tenant unions on a citywide or regional scale, developing both the administrative skills — running meetings, managing communication, sustaining membership — and the political skills required to make hard asks of neighbors and realize the transformative potential of collective action. Members also trained through the Tenant Union Federation's Union School, deepening their grounding in union structure, federation models, and the strategic foundations of the broader tenant union movement. That investment in training is not incidental — it reflects our belief that effective organizing requires rigor, and that the people most harmed by the housing crisis deserve organizers who take their craft seriously.

Our organizing is explicitly anti-capitalist. We understand the housing crisis not as a series of bad actors or policy failures, but as a structural consequence of treating shelter as a vehicle for profit. We build toward a future where housing is decommodified, publicly controlled, and guaranteed for all. If you are interested in tenant organizing, join us!

Community Engagement

Socialism is a practice of solidarity, and solidarity requires showing up. The Community Involvement and Volunteer Initiatives Committee (CIVIC) is how the Flint Hills DSA embeds itself in the fabric of our local communities — not as an outside political organization descending with a message, but as neighbors, coworkers, and community members building genuine relationships and meeting real needs alongside the people we organize with.

CIVIC coordinates our chapter's volunteer initiatives, connecting members with mutual aid efforts, community events, and local organizations working to address food insecurity, housing instability, environmental harm, and other material conditions that affect working-class life in the Flint Hills region. We believe that being present in our communities is itself a political act — that socialist politics must be lived, not just argued, and that the trust required for radical transformation is built through consistent, accountable relationships over time.

We also cultivate partnerships with other community organizations, labor unions, faith communities, and advocacy groups, recognizing that the coalition required to win a socialist future will be broad, diverse, and deeply rooted in place.

Political Education

We cannot build a world we cannot yet imagine, and we cannot fight a system we do not fully understand. Political education is not a supplement to organizing; it is organizing. The Flint Hills DSA's political education program is designed to develop the critical consciousness, historical knowledge, and theoretical grounding that make our organizing more effective, more coherent, and more radical.

Our political education work takes many forms. Our monthly book club, the Flint Hills Socialist Book Club, brings members together to read and discuss works spanning Marxist theory, labor history, feminist and anti-racist politics, decolonial thought, and more — creating space for the kind of sustained, collective intellectual engagement that transforms how we see the world. We curate lists of podcasts and vides that make socialist ideas accessible to everyone. Film screenings and documentary discussions connect political theory to lived experience, grounding abstract ideas in the concrete histories of working-class struggle.

We draw on a broad tradition, from the labor education movements of the early twentieth century to the Freedom Schools of the Civil Rights era to the popular education methodology of Paulo Freire, understanding that real political education is not transmission from expert to student, but a dialogical process in which people develop critical consciousness through collective reflection on their own conditions and experiences. Our political education program is built for working people, by working people, and it is open to anyone willing to engage honestly with the questions our moment demands.