To Be Useful Is To Serve
About Our Practice
Grassroots Work
Contact & Services
True to Mission
Community Work

Capacity Building

The Four Steps

Mission: Congruent with founding core beliefs.

Guiding Principles: Animating work to ensure mission fulfillment.

Strategic Plan: Aligned with mission and guiding principles; reviewed regularly.

Plan of Work: Tactics to fulfill strategic plan.

Effective capacity building, upon the foundation of realizing these four steps, and understanding the dynamics of the invisible and the philanthropic spirit, is much more art than science and much more theology than ideology.
Grassroots Work
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Grass begins growing close to the ground, rooted in the earth, forming a soft carpet to walk or lie on. Properly nourished, it grows strong, reaching out to embrace bare earth in its search for unity. A grassroots organization, optimally, is the same. It grows strong through the embrace of a vision shared with others, standing in solidarity with those others impacted by their vision, and only together do they make a grassroots organization truly effective and help it to become a community institution.
Grassroots organizations traditionally work only the mission, and it is from those mission-driven groups that the deepest community help is given, human dignity protected, and hope encouraged.
Grassroots organizations often serve unpopular causes; helping the poor, the dispossessed, the distressed, touching the untouchables, bringing hope to the prisoner, and comforting the alienated. They are driven by passion, spirit, an abiding sense of their mission, and they are staffed by people who deeply believe in what they are doing, often working for wages most would scoff at.
In their growth, grassroots organizations rebuild the broken spirits and help develop productive, hard-working citizens; and more often than most of us know, in the process of their work become the saintly souls, like Dorothy Day and Mother Teresa, who walk and work among us.
Grassroots organizations are the most difficult organizations within the nonprofit sector to develop and sustain, yet they promise the most effective vehicle for human transformation. They work classically within the framework of one person to one person. They develop friendships and relationships that nurture and strengthen the suffering human being. They are truly organizations of meaning, and at their best, the epitome of learning organizations.
There is now emerging one demographic reality -- the retirement of the baby boomers -- that promises a blooming of mission-driven grassroots organizations whose work will be undertaken by this most idealistic of generations, to help bring about the California dreams embraced so many years ago and so vitally needed today.
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