Grassroots Leadership
Si Kahn, Executive Director
Alfreda Barringer, Director of Training and Education
PO Box 36006
1515 Elizabeth Avenue
Charlotte, N.C. 28236

The concept behind this unique and effective model is so simple that it doesn't take long to tell; but make no mistake; it requires hard, dogged effort and wise leadership to make it work.

To make a long story short, Grassroots Leadership is a statewide (and regional) community organizing effort that works with established and emerging community-organizing groups to provide them technical assistance and training and the support they need to coalesce around issues in their own communities. It also provides networking and an overall umbrella under which participating groups may work together toward common goals.

The organization was founded in 1980 by Si Kahn, a folksinger and song writer and long-time activist with deep roots in the civil-rights movement that go back to work with the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Council in Arkansas during the '60s; after that, he worked in labor organizing for a time, then moved to broader community organizing and founded Grassroots Leadership 16 years ago when he saw a need for networking and training to support and develop local community organizing efforts in North Carolina and throughout the Southeast.

Operating out of space shared with a law office in an inner-city Charlotte neighborhood and functioning with a small budget ($500,000) and staff (five full-time, five interns and much help from the 15 members of its board of directors), Grassroots Leadership's organizers have helped organize, some 15 to 20 local groups, ranging from the Charlotte Organizing Project (CHOP) to statewide groups like North Carolina and South Carolina Fair Share; environmental organizations like the Clean Water Fund in Asheville; an activist groups like Tri-County United Action (later South Carolina United Action) in Orangeburg, SC, and its most recent effort, PADLOC (Parents Against Daily Losing Our Children) in Durham. Grassroots Leadership traditionally starts local groups and then spins them off as independent organizations, but with funds shrinking, there's some discussion about changing that policy, Barringer said, with Grassroots Leadership retaining formal ties with newly formed groups to provide centralized services and support.

In addition to this kind of grassroots organizing, Grassroots Leadership also works in coalition with national organizations like the Center for Third World Organizing in Oakland, California, and provides fee-based training and educational events all over the United States. Its relatively new (1991) "Barriers and Bridges" project, headed by the Rev. James Williams, works one-on-one with community and regional groups (including Kentuckians for the Commonwealth and Literacy South) to help them deeply analyze their own internal and external operations and address "issues of oppression" within their own organization and in the communities they serve. Another new program, "Practicing Political Education," has reached out to college students in California and New York State with an appeal to consider community organizing and minority-rights issues along with more traditional public-affairs career choices. And, on the local level, its "Charlotte Youth United" program has sponsored numerous workshops for students around such issues as "student racism in schools," "eliminating stereotypes," "preventing hate crimes" and more.

As the best model programs do, Grassroots Leadership actively seeks out problems and looks for creative ways to solve them. It all comes back to its simple mission: "...to help people get power so they control decisions that affect their day-to-day lives. We carry with us a deep commitment to the ability of disempowered people to determine the direction of their own lives in a way that respects differences and honors shared goals of a peaceful, just society."

All the feature stories on @GRASS-ROOTS.ORG's pages are reported and written by Robin Garr, a prize-winning journalist who has visited more than 500 innovative grassroots programs in all 50 states since 1990.

Browse his book, Reinvesting In America, at Amazon.com.

Send him E-mail.

Back to the @GRASS-ROOTS.ORG Home Page