OPINION: What makes grassroots organisations so exceptional?

17 Feb

With thanks to Sydney McCourt, from Opening Doors, for this photo. The content for this article was developed from a report featuring Opening Doors.

Summary

At CSC, we’ve always believed grassroots organisations are special. Through recent research and delivering capacity-building to over 127 organisations, we’ve managed to drill it down to four qualities: they’re agile, intrinsically motivated, trusted and knowledgeable. It is thanks to these qualities that grassroots organisations are able to fill gaps in public services, meeting the needs of people and communities often described as ‘hard to reach’.
Grassroots organisations ‘led by and for’ marginalised communities have potential as a vehicle for reducing health inequalities.
Through our work, we see what grassroots organisations are capable of - even though they are not currently supported and properly resourced. Just imagine what impact they could have if they were!

CSC has managed to identify what it is that makes grassroots organisations led by and for marginalised communities so amazing. We’ve recently worked with New Philanthropy Capital (NPC) to produce an impressive body of evidence on the need for more equitable and inclusive grantmaking processes, and established what funders can do to make their processes more equitable and inclusive. We’re carrying out a second participatory piece of research with LGBT+ Consortium and the National Lottery Community Fund to analyse the impact/value of the LGBT+ Futures: Equity Fund, which is specifically targeted at grassroots organisations led by and for intersectional communities.. Having also supported 127 grassroots organisations, as embedded consultants through our own Steps to Sustainability programme, we have first-hand experience of the immense value and untapped potential of grassroots organisations.

At CSC, we’ve always believed grassroots organisations are a special thing. Take Khadra for example, a Somali woman from West London. She experienced social exclusion and wanted to do something about it for other women and families in her area. Consequently, she founded MACWO, a community group that evolved into a charity. It doesn’t take a genius to see that Khadra is uniquely well-positioned to support her community who often have a nuanced experiences.

Through these recent assignments, we’ve drilled down what makes grassroots organisations so special to four qualities: they are agile, intrinsically motivated, trusted and knowledgeable. It is thanks to these qualities that these organisations - which are often faith led - are able to fill gaps in public services, meeting the needs of people and communities often described as ‘hard to reach’.

These qualities are true of many place-based civil society organisations (such as carers centres, which tend to be led by lived experiences), but are pertinent to grassroots organisations led by and for disadvantaged/marginalised communities. In particular, organisations are a vehicle for tackling health inequalities via ‘strength-based’ approaches to health in underserved communities - i.e. going with the grain of a community's interests and leveraging their existing strengths. CSC has a vision of supporting, catalysing and empowering them to reduce health inequalities, through S2S.

Agility

Being deeply embedded in the community, grassroots organisations are able to move quickly in response to challenges, community needs and opportunities; for example, S2S organisation Amal Project Teesside – based in Stockton-on-Tees – recognised that ethnic minority, refugee and asylum seeker communities were being overlooked in local emergency food provisions during the pandemic: food provided by mainstream food banks was not meeting ethnic communities’ cultural and dietary requirements. These communities also faced additional barriers to receive this support, including: language; the experience of ‘community shame’; and, fear due to immigration status. To circumvent these barriers, and to ensure emergency food met the needs’ of these overlooked communities, Amal Project Teesside quickly mobilised to create culturally appropriate food hampers, delivered for the community by the community. The organisation quickly gained support, receiving funding from Middlesbrough Football Club Foundation and UNICEF (they also appeared on the BBC!) Since the pandemic, Amal Project Teesside shifted its delivery model to an ethnic minority-focused eco-shop to provide low cost culturally appropriate food options to the community.

Motivation

Organisations led by and for marginalised communities are:

Genuinely invested: Because they are working to alleviate issues that have affected their community, families, and themselves as individuals, they have greater motivation to be the change they want to see.
Resourceful: Due to their embeddedness in the communities they are serving, they are more likely to have increased accountability, which means that they find creative solutions when problems arise and will continue to operate even when the odds are stacked against them.
Consistent and committed: Bigger organisations tend to follow trends and launch initiatives to ‘fix something’ quickly before moving on to something else; whereas organisations led by and for communities - like MACWO - are committed to the long–term continuation of their initiatives that work – whether they are seen to be ‘on-trend’ or not.
Because they’re so deeply motivated, these organisations will often keep doing the work whether they’re funded, valued and supported or not. Unfortunately, this means they can be exploited by governments, communities and individuals as ‘free labour.’

Trust

Under-resourced and underserved communities typically have low trust in public service providers and outsiders due to a history of being let down. Being led by a community member, working in hyperlocal ways, and being consistent and committed means these organisations are more likely to be trusted by the communities they serve.

We learnt from our work evaluating LGBT Consortium’s LGBT+ Futures: Equity Fund, that -

“Older LGBT+ people are terrified by the idea of mainstream services - they have been traumatised by negative experiences earlier in life and they fear that people won’t respect who they are and how they identify.”

In our research into the assets and persistent issues of several socio-economically deprived communities to inform North Star Housing Associations’ community investment strategy, trust was a recurring theme. The grassroots organisations we interviewed repeatedly stated that local communities were best placed to support communities because they are trusted. One interviewee said: “if you have trust, you can move mountains.”

Indeed, organisations that are led by the community that it seeks to serve have the trusted relationships in place to deliver support. What’s more, they don’t have to allocate as many resources into securing and sustaining engagement as larger organisations (not led by that community) typically would - because they have those pre-existing authentic connections.

Consequently, grassroots organisations have been recognised as effective communicators to underserved and ‘hard-to-reach’ communities that authorities fail to engage. During the pandemic, the Government created the ‘Community Champions’ programme, which funded grassroots organisations – via local authorities – to tailor and deliver public health messages to ethnic minority communities. The programme aimed to leverage grassroots organisations across the country that were already mobilised to deliver public health messaging to ethnic minority communities instinctually; for example, alongside the delivery of emergency food.

Local and nuanced knowledge

‘Led by and for’ organisations are embedded in communities and have their ‘eyes on the ground’, which means they have unparalleled knowledge of the communities they serve. Additionally, because they are often working on issues from direct or lived experience, they are more likely to understand their communities and more closely represent them. With this nuanced understanding, they are better equipped to serve communities than larger organisations (which often lack lived experience), allowing the experiences of the communities they serve to be constructed externally.

Therefore, organisations led by the community can appropriately and effectively mitigate nuanced topics and intra-community issues. What’s more, grassroots organisations can provide useful insight about their community, which can be leveraged by funders, larger organisations, and local and national governments. For example, BollyFit Active are successfully supporting the South Asian community in and surrounding Manchester through culturally appropriate fitness classes. Through these sessions, Bollyfit directly addresses the physical and mental health inequalities and barriers faced by minority women. The charity has ‘snowballed’ due to increasing demand and partnerships with local GP surgeries, health care commissioning boards, and several other community organisations who recognised this profound gap in provisions - but needed Bollyfit’s deep and trusted connections to reach this so-called ‘hard to reach’ community. Nevertheless, it remains important that these organisations are properly acknowledged for their contributions through meaningful inclusion – including remuneration – as to avoid them being taken for granted.

To conclude

Grassroots organisations are too valuable to not support. We’ve evidenced that such organisations are agile, motivated, trusted by and knowledge of their communities - they’re already filling the gaps in public services and are extremely well-placed to become a formalised pathway for inequalities at scale.

There have indeed been policy shifts – for example the ‘Community Champions’ programme during the pandemic – that recognise the usefulness of grassroots organisations. However, it is arguable that state-driven resource and infrastructure support for these organisations is not sufficient and results in burnout and mistrust of authorities, which undermines the sustainability of this model.

There are lessons to be learnt if authorities want to meaningfully engage and get the best out of grassroots organisations. This is particularly pertinent at a time when UK public health strategy is increasingly moving towards strength based approaches (ie. going with the grain of the community). Grassroots organisations must be sufficiently resourced and supported so our entire society can reap the multi-faceted benefits. This can be done by generous financial investment into these communities, as well as investment into development of their capacity, which is what our organisation’s flagship initiative, Steps to Sustainability,seeks to do.

We too believe a well-resourced and funded and empowered grassroots sector ‘can move mountains’.

Natasha Ereira-Guyer