Grassroots International Programs
Grassroots International provides critical support to the most vital and effective social movements in Latin America, the Middle East, the Caribbean, Africa and Asia. Over 28 years, we have built up long-term and deep relationships with key and effective movement organizations. Through this accumulation of trust, contacts, and know-how, we are strategically nurturing the key seeds of social change and justice that will ignite the greatest change. We focus particularly on peasants’, women’s, and indigenous people’s movements organizing for the rights to land, water, and food. Our strategy encompasses the following:
Fostering Powerful Movements: We support efforts that increase the power of the resource rights and food sovereignty movements, break isolation, allow effective strategy-sharing, and unite cross-border campaigns whose impact is exponentially greater than the sum of the parts.
Promoting Sustainable Livelihoods: We increase the capacity of our partners in the Global South to build sustainable, ecologically sound development solutions; advance women’s and indigenous people’s livelihoods; and serve as entry points for organizing and leadership development.
Defending Human Rights: We help partner organizations defend the full range of human and environmental rights, as well as monitor and document human rights abuses. We defend the rights of movement leaders and activists who increasingly find themselves targeted by governments trying to criminalize and intimidate those who organize for social justice.
Recent Successes and Current Challenges
Some of our achievements include:
- Supporting Brazil’s Movement of Landless Workers (MST) which secured land for 350,000 previously landless workers. - Grassroots International participated as part of a global network of advocates behind the historic UN passage of the universal declaration that all humans have a right to water and sanitation.
- As a result of hard work by the Grassroots International grantee Via Campesina's Central America Campaign to Stop Violence against Rural Women and others, Nicaragua's legislature recently passed landmark legislation to stop violence against women and protect their human rights in that nation.
- We played a key role in the creation of the U.S. Food Sovereignty Alliance—a coalition of groups from family farmers and farm workers to consumers and faith-based organizations working on such diverse issues as sustainable agriculture, climate justice, biodiversity and consumer rights.
- Grassroots and its partners in Haiti rescued the Creole pig—a crucial form of “piggy bank” and the backbone of the rural economy for Haitian peasants—from near extinction to more than 5,000. This is benefitting over 112,000 families.
- Our support has helped establish over 1300 vegetable gardens led by indigenous women in the southern regions of Mexico, increasing nutrition and providing a source of income for the women and their families there.
We currently are seeking donations for our resource rights work—the right of family farmers to land, water and food.