Lukenbill & Associates

Capacity Building for Grassroots Organizations

True to Mission

Grassroots Organizations Begin in the Heart of One Person

There is a fable of a man who climbed to the top of a mountain and grabbed truth. Satan had directed one of his demons to follow the man and when the demon told Satan about the man's success, he was unperturbed, "Don't worry," Satan said, "I'll tempt him to institutionalize it."

The leaders of grasroots organizations are the social entrepreneurs of the nonprofit sector. They have seized hold of a truth and organized others around it for the good of the community. The community is best served by their being able to keep closely aligned with their core values, vision, and mission (their truth) as they evolve into a community institution.

While one of the goals of all grassroots organizations is to become institutionalized to the point that community support becomes a stable given, it is too often precisely the point at which they become much less effective as a mission-driven organization. The truth often gives way to the expediency of becoming stable and solvent.

Community transformation emerges from the small, grassroots organization, through the work of a few committed individuals coming together for a great cause. It is from the grassroots that individual dignity is protected, hope encouraged, communities strengthened and their bank of social capital deepened.

The leaders of these organizations are the true inheritors of the voluntary associations of virtue and service to the public good that Benjamin Franklin brought to fruition in colonial America and Alexis de Tocqueville marveled at in the 19th century in his landmark book, Democracy in America.

De Tocqueville came to America in the early 1800's, met with many of the country's founders, and wrote one of the most perceptive books ever written about America. This is a small part of what he wrote about voluntary associations and America: "Thus the most democratic country in the world now is that in which men have in our time carried to the highest perfection the art of pursuing in common the objects of common desires and have applied this new technique to the greatest number of purposes. Is that just an accident, or is there really some necessary connection between associations and equality."

Among the nobility of the time, of which De Tocqueville (as a French count) was a member , good work was accomplished, when it was, by the nobility coercing others to follow them in the accomplishment of their aims. De Tocqueville had never witnessed common people banding together voluntarily to accomplish social ends and he marveled at it, understanding that it was, in many ways, the basis of democracy itself.

When I think about what defines a grassroots organization, I think back to this initial formation: mission-driven, entrepreneurial, voluntary and community-based. The real grassroots organization begins in the heart of one person who has witnessed injustice and wants to right it, or been moved by beauty and wants to share it, or gained wisdom and wants to teach it, or transformed the pain of their suffering into the power of teaching and comforting others.

These leaders often begin without any money, but have an idea to help, in some way, the world they see in front of them. Through their passion and dedication they bring others along with them in their journey of healing and joy and begin the process of transformation and sharing.

If they are wise, lucky, and committed enough, they will survive and grow strong, and we will be the richer for their struggles, as they bring their healing and joyful service to our troubled world. If they succumb to the lure of financial stability over the purity of their vision and mission, we will ultimately be the lesser as their promise becomes the maintenance of the staus quo.

Eric Hoffer, a longshoreman who worked in San Francisco for many years, wrote a book called The True Believer. His thesis was that the true believers, who strive for a belief to the exclusion of all else, are to be feared, for they are the soil from which political and religious fanaticism springs. There is much truth to this, but at the same time, it is the true believer who drives the social misison onward. It is the way of Dorothy Day, Cesar Chavez, Mother Teresa, and Martin Luther King whose passion and true belief in their work in the world drove a social agenda that enriched us all.

So, what is the role of grassroots organizations?

It is to shake the established way of doing things if there is a better way, it is to speak truth to the power of entrenched failure, to be true to your mission of truth, to venerate that truth and express it through love for those who need help, through justice in honor of their suffering, through sharing beauty and the joy of artistic discovery, and through community building in pursuit of the transformation of the great human heart of the commons.

"The best things are nearest; breath in your nostrils, light in your eyes, flowers at your feet, duties at your hand, the path of God just before you." Robert Louis Stevenson