After years of collaboration, ArchCity Defenders and Action St. Louis have partnered to open a new facility in north St. Louis that will house legal, social and advocacy services under one roof.
The new Northside Movement Center, a renovated property on Goodfellow Boulevard in the North Pointe neighborhood, will serve as a central hub for residents who have long faced disinvestment and limited access to legal or social support. The center will officially open in January and employ about 65 people between the two organizations.
ArchCity Defenders, a nonprofit civil rights law firm, and Action St. Louis, a grassroots advocacy group, bought and redeveloped the former New North Side Family Life Center building. Leaders describe it as a major investment in the city’s north side and a commitment to building sustainable community infrastructure.
“The people we’ve represented in courts and through these campaigns are mostly located in St. Louis city and county,” said Z Gorley, ArchCity Defenders’ communications director. “So our idea is to centralize the array of services we provide under one roof. Clients will be able to meet with their attorneys, paralegals and social workers who help folk find housing and make sure they have food in the fridge, and Action will have their own suite of offices as well with a core staff in the building to meet the community’s needs.”
The two organizations have spent nearly a decade working together on campaigns aimed at reshaping local housing, criminal justice and economic systems.
“During the pandemic, we developed partnerships that organically led to conversations about getting some shared space to build out a hub of services and advocacy in North St. Louis,” said Blake Strode, ArchCity Defenders’ executive director. “That’s where a disproportionate number of our clients, campaign members, and members of Action come from and where a lot of our work has centered.”
Action St. Louis Executive Director Kayla Reed said their shared track record made the next step obvious.
“Together, we’ve done a few things,” Reed said. “The ‘Close the Workhouse’ campaign, the ‘We the Tenants’ campaign, and we’ve collaborated on other initiative things and political debates over the years. We have shared work because we have shared vision.”
Through those efforts, Action St. Louis mobilized residents while ArchCity Defenders provided legal representation and eviction defense. Their joint “We the Tenants” initiative helped advance a local Tenant Bill of Rights and other policies to protect renters from predatory landlords and unsafe living conditions.
The organizations say the new Northside Movement Center will strengthen their ability to provide direct legal aid, tenant assistance, housing advocacy and social services — particularly for Black families in neighborhoods hit hardest by poverty, overpolicing and disinvestment.
Carla Reid, president of the Mark Twain Neighborhood Association, said her group was among the first the collaborators approached about community needs.
“For me, for them to take us under their umbrella just to ask ‘How can we help,’ was a very instrumental lesson in building communities,” Reid said.
The center is expected to also serve as an emergency coordination hub during future crises. After a May 2024 tornado tore through north St. Louis, Action St. Louis and partner groups delivered food, supplies and clean-up assistance to thousands of residents. Reed said those kinds of services will continue.
“Say, for instance, they’ve been impacted by the tornado … they can talk to a social worker if they’re being evicted, they can talk to a lawyer or talk to us about what assistance is out there or maybe ways they can communicate what they’re going through with powerbrokers or elected officials about what needs to happen next.”
Strode said the partnership also responds to broader economic and political pressures facing low-income residents.
“From the municipal level to the state level of communities in St. Louis — particularly poor and working-class Black communities — St. Louis has been targeted with over-policing and the downstream effects of that is people are trapped in a system of caging and collateral consequences generationally. That’s at the core of ACD’s legal work,” he said.
He added that shrinking safety-net programs have increased the urgency for locally anchored services.
“We are already watching fairly minimal protections and resources for people who are already surviving on the margins disappearing rapidly in the midst of this government shutdown,” Strode said.
Both leaders describe the new center as an investment in people and place — an attempt to stabilize neighborhoods while modeling what community-based infrastructure can look like in the city’s north side.
“North St. Louis was already hobbled and had been long neglected and disinvested for decades before the tornado came along,” Strode said. “Now we see true desperation and a level of displacement that threatens to permanently change the complexion of North St. Louis if we don’t take immediate action.”
Asked about capacity to meet community demand, he said collaboration is key.
“The need is sometimes overwhelming,” Strode said. “But it’s also the reason why we must be in partnerships with other organizations, coalitions, and informal groups of people trying to make a change. For the size we are, we stretch our resources as far as we can and we have had an impact we’re proud of.”
Sylvester Brown Jr. is the Deaconess Foundation Community Advocacy Fellow.