The Network of Texas IAF Organizations (NTO) consists of 10 affiliates organized around issues affecting families including healthcare, education, workforce development and immigration.
Our organizations have a long history of success influencing local and state policies affecting the Texas labor market, the Children's Health Insurance Program, indigent healthcare, infrastructure in the colonias, school finance and governance, and education reform.
Each of the organizations that make of the NTO is a collective dues-paying member institutions, including religious congregations, schools, civic associations, labor and professional organizations, and non-profits. Each organization seeks to:
• Build relationships of trust among people and institutions across the racial, denominational, economic and geographic boundaries that divide our cities
• Strengthen congregations and community institutions by developing the skills and capacity of their leaders
• Create a vehicle for ordinary families to have a powerful voice in the decisions that affect their lives and communities, instead of leaving decision-making in the hands of a select few
• Take action on concrete, winnable issues, that are transforming our communities every day.
We believe in independence. All the organizations of the NTO are politically non-partisan. We will not endorse any candidate or party for elected office, and we will not pursue or accept government funding for any of our organizations.
We believe in education. Our mission is to build organizations that are “universities of public life”, dedicated to developing citizens in the fullest sense: participants in our democracy and agents in the creation of a more just society.
The NTO includes 10 organizations throughout Texas: COPS / Metro Alliance, San Antonio; Dallas Area Interfaith; AMOS, Arlington / Mansfield; EPISO / Border Interfaith, El Paso; West Texas Organizing Strategy, Lubbock; TMO / GCLC, Houston; Austin Interfaith; Valley Interfaith, Rio Grande Valley; and The Border Organization in Del Rio. We are part of the West / Southwest region of the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF), the oldest and largest organizing and leadership development network in the United States.