Thomas A Gaudette was a community organizer who worked in the Austin neighborhood of Chicago.
16 Facts About Tom Gaudette
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Originally a businessman, Gaudette became interested in neighborhood organizing through his Catholic Church activism.
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Tom Gaudette helped form a neighborhood group, along the lines of those organized by Saul Alinsky, on the far West Side of Chicago called Organization for a Better Austin.
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Tom Gaudette founded the Mid-America Institute for Community Organizations, and trained notable organizers like Shel Trapp and Gale Cincotta.
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Thomas A Gaudette was born in 1923, in Medford, Massachusetts.
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Tom Gaudette's parents were Roman Catholic and his father a member of a railroad union, two critical influences on Tom Gaudette's later development as a community organizer.
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Tom Gaudette served with distinction in the United States Army Air Corps in World War II, surviving the famous raid on Ploesti, Romania, and by war's end earning the Distinguished Flying Cross, the Air Medal, and a Presidential Unit Citation.
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Tom Gaudette emerged as a leader of this organization, serving as its president and spokesman in fights over such issues as zoning restrictions and controls on taverns in Chatham-Avalon Park.
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Tom Gaudette went to work for Alinsky on Chicago's west side, organizing the Northwest Community Organization in 1961, one of the hallmark Alinsky community organizations in Chicago.
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NCO, under Tom Gaudette's tutelage, fought the extensive demolition of housing planned for the area because of urban renewal.
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Chicago would remain his base of operations, even after Tom Gaudette founded the Mid-America Institute for Community Development in 1972, the same year that Alinsky died.
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Tom Gaudette used the Institute for his work throughout the country and even Asia as an independent trainer and teacher of community organizers.
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Monsignor Egan credited Tom Gaudette with inspiring more community organizers than any other person, many of whom originally worked with him.
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Tom Gaudette was responsible for community organizations in Seattle, Kansas City, and Baltimore, among other places.
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On his death in 1998, Tom Gaudette left a considerable legacy to the work of community organizing, attested to by the persons he trained, as well as by his philosophy of organizing summarized in this eloquent quotation:.
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Various documents related to Thomas A Gaudette are archived at Loyola Marymount University as part of its Center for the Study of Los Angeles collection.