Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement is a nonprofit organization with over 3,200 members in all of Iowa’s 99 counties. The group is growing and gaining support for their policy of putting people first.

David Goodner, an organizer for Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement, describes the base idea of the organization.

“People before politics, people before profits, people before polluters and communities before corporations,” Goodner said.

Started in Waterloo in 1975, the group has expanded into the organization it is today, and they have helped multiple bills pass through legislature.

Most of these bills attempt to stop corporations and pollution.

“One big success recently was the ban on spreading manure on frozen and snow-covered ground in 2009,” Goodner said. “Our biggest work right now is with factory farms.”

Spreading manure on frozen ground creates ground pollution, as the manure does not seep into the ground. The group has stopped more than 100 factory farms from being built since 1995.

“Communities are approaching them to keep factory farms out of their neighborhood,” said Angie Carter, member of Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement and ISU graduate student in sociology.

The group is also interested in education and the Board of Regents, pushing for Craig Lang and Bruce Rastetter to step down for what it considers numerous unscrupulous economic and farming practices.

It supports a tuition freeze for students and pushes for “lowering tuition by fully funding higher education to not just stop, but reverse, the bad trend,” Goodner said.

The ethics complaint against Rastetter last summer, along with keeping the Board of Regents transparent and accountable, is the main reason Carter joined the group.

“I think it’s also very important that they are nonpartisan,” Carter said. “They’re organizing around issues that are important to Iowans rather than around issues that are important to different political campaigns.”

Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement is focused on stopping wage theft throughout Iowa.

“We have organized for primarily Latino workers to recover more than $155,000 in stolen wages from shady, unscrupulous employers and bosses,” Goodner said. “We also helped write and publish a large wage theft report showing it costs Iowa workers $600 million a year and costs the state of Iowa $60 million in lost revenue.”

Getting health care coverage to people who need it is another goal of Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement.

“Medicaid expansion is one of the major issues with this legislation,” Goodner said.

Payday lending, a loan practice which can charge high interest rates, has been in the group’s crosshairs lately. “We have won local ordinances cracking down on predatory payday lending in five major Iowa cities and are expanding the campaign,” Goodner said.

“We are pushing for statewide interest rate caps of 36 percent instead of the current 400 percent.”

Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement has made national news in the most recent presidential race. The group’s continuous questioning caused presidential candidate Mitt Romney to say, “Corporations are people, my friend,” when visiting the Iowa State Fair in 2011.

The organization is easy to join, Carter said.

“It’s really important to be part of a group that has the capacity to really raise state-level concerns to higher levels and bring all sorts of people together for a more environmentally and socially just Iowa,” Carter said.