What Does "Grassroots" Really Mean for Nonprofits in 2026 — And Have We Lost It?
By Laurence A. Pagnoni, MPA
Author, The Nonprofit Fundraising Solution | Former Faculty, NYU Heyman Center for Philanthropy, School of Professional Studies
We Call Ourselves Grassroots — But Are We Still?
Chuck Selvaggio, the founder and director of Neighbors to Nicaragua (neighborstonicaragua.com), put it plainly: "We're not corporate, we're still grassroots and we're going to stay that way because it has served us well and the people in Nicaragua well. I don't even care very much about nonprofit sector best practice research. Research here in the US is done without the real knowledge or reality in Nicaragua. I'm working from that reality."
His comment to me in an email gave me pause, and started this blog post. There was defiance in it, yes, but it also named what many nonprofit leaders feel but rarely say out loud. The word "grassroots" has been stretched across so many organizational types, funding models, and strategic frameworks that it has begun to lose its meaning. This post shows a timeline of how the modern nonprofit got here, where we came from and how we developed. By contrasting two actual grassroots nonprofits, one large, one small, it explores where we are with being grassroots, and, at the close, poses prompts for your leadership team's own inquiry. Use the prompts to assess where you may want to head in your own organization.
What the Word Meant — and Why Kim Klein Chose It
The expression grassroots comes from American political organizing in the early twentieth century. It described movements that grew from below — from communities and neighborhoods — before institutions organized them from above. It was always a word about power, not about size.
When Kim Klein and Lisa Honig co-founded the Grassroots Fundraising Journal in 1982 (grassrootsfundraisingjournal.org), they chose the word deliberately. The existing books on nonprofit fundraising had been written for large mainstream institutions. Almost nothing existed for organizations with few or no staff, little or even no front money, and no infrastructure — and yet those were the organizations doing the community-based work for social change in America. Klein and Honig knew that a rich oral tradition of fundraising practice existed among small nonprofits, particularly those in marginalized and low-income communities. They decided to write it down and publish the journal. It ran for 37 years until 2020, offering practical advice on individual donor campaigns, face-to-face asks, and special events. The word "grassroots" in the title was a clear choice: it said this knowledge belongs to organizations that challenge the status quo, and we intend to make it available to them.
"Beyond strategy, however, grassroots fundraising has a deep philosophical meaning: the people most affected by an issue need to be at the forefront of deciding what to do about it. When a group of people want something to happen, whether it is as small as cleaning up a neighborhood park or as large as advocating for policy change, the outcome will be most successful if the entire community is invited to participate." — Kim Klein, Grassroots Fundraising Journal Archive (nonprofitquarterly.org/grassroots-fundraising-journal-about/)
That definition is not about budget. not about staff size or geography or founding date. It is about a power relationship between the organization and the community it claims to serve.
Roots That Go Deeper Than Any Sector Timeline
Before the nonprofit sector had a name, the practices that would later be called grassroots were already being developed — in Chicago's Nineteenth Ward Settlement House, in the urban houses of hospitality of the Catholic Worker houses, and in the Black Panthers services of West Oakland, CA and Phila., PA.
The timeline that follows this section is necessarily a broad sketch. It does not contain everything that brought us here, for sure; but it does give us a needed context.
Jane Addams and her friend Ellen Gates Starr founded Hull House in Chicago in 1889 — the first settlement house in the United States. (hullhousemuseum.org) What distinguished Hull House from charitable organizations of its era was not the services it offered but the fact that Addams and her colleagues lived there. They did not visit the neighborhood, but were members of it. Addams lived at Hull House until her death in 1935 — forty-six years in residence. Hull House grew to thirteen buildings and offered health clinics, English and citizenship classes, childcare, labor organizing support, and art programs. In 1931, Addams received the Nobel Peace Prize, the first American woman to do so. (womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/jane-addams) The model she built — practitioners living alongside the people they served — anticipated by decades what the international Partners in Health would later call accompaniment.
Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin founded the Catholic Worker movement in New York City on May Day 1933, during the Great Depression. (Britannica: britannica.com/event/Catholic-Worker-Movement) Their houses of hospitality operated on a core principle whereby members lived in community with the people they served. The service was not delivered from a distance. Day refused certain institutional entanglements because she understood that accepting them would change the nature of the work. The Catholic Worker newspaper, which they also launched in 1933, reached a circulation of 150,000 within three years. Over 200 autonomous communities associated with the movement exist today. (catholicworker.org)
The Black Panther Party's Free Breakfast for Children Program began in January 1969 at St. Augustine's Episcopal Church in West Oakland, organized by Party members, Father Earl Neil, and community parishioner Ruth Beckford-Smith. (BlackPast.org: blackpast.org/african-american-history/black-panther-partys-free-breakfast-program-1969-1980/) On the first day, 11 children were fed. By the end of that week, 135. By the end of 1969, more than 20,000 children were being fed daily across 23 cities. The program was funded by community donations and local businesses — no foundation grants, no government contracts. In a 1969 U.S. Senate hearing, the administrator of the national School Lunch Program acknowledged that the Panthers were feeding more poor school children than the State of California. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover called the program "potentially the greatest threat to efforts by authorities to neutralize the Panthers." Hoover could have focused on the weapons, or the rhetoric, but he understood the emotional affinity engendered by providing kids with a breakfast. The program is broadly credited as a factor in Congress making the federal School Breakfast Program a national entitlement in 1975. (History.com: history.com/articles/free-school-breakfast-black-panther-party)
What Hull House, the Catholic Worker houses, and the Panther breakfast program share is not an ideology or a funding model. It is a practice: the people delivering the service were embedded in or part of the community being served.
The timeline below traces what happened to that practice when the nonprofit sector organized itself as a profession.
Timeline: How the Nonprofit Sector Professionalized — A Broad Sketch
This timeline is not exhaustive. It traces one arc across a complex history — the arc of professionalization. Many other stories run alongside it.
Pre-1960s
What happened: No unified "sector" — thousands of independent organizations, mostly volunteer-led, rooted in community. No shared professional identity, no career path, no common name for what they were.
Why it matters: The grassroots tradition was the primary tradition. Hull House (1889), the Catholic Worker houses (1933), the Black Panther breakfast programs (1969) operated entirely outside any sector framework. Community embeddedness was not a value to be protected, but the default condition.
1964–1968: War on Poverty
What happened: The Economic Opportunity Act of 1964 created Community Action Programs with a legally mandated requirement for "maximum feasible participation" of the poor in designing and running poverty programs. By 1968 there were 1,600 Community Action Agencies.
Why it matters: For the first time, federal law required that the communities being served have power over the programs serving them. Urban mayors — led by Chicago's Richard Daley — objected and pressured the Johnson administration to roll back the requirement. The legal mandate for community participation was gradually weakened. This is the moment when the power relationship was first contested at scale. (Economic Opportunity Act, 1964; EBSCO Research)
1960s–1970s: Social Movements
What happened: The civil rights movement, women's liberation, farmworker organizing, LGBTQ+ rights, and environmental activism produced thousands of small community organizations explicitly suspicious of professionalization — understanding it as a mechanism for defusing community power rather than amplifying it.
Why it matters: These organizations were the sector's living grassroots inheritance. Many would later be professionalized, absorbed, or replaced by credentialed nonprofit corporations. The tension between movement culture and organizational culture that began here has never been fully resolved.
1973–1980: The Sector Is Named
What happened: The Commission on Private Philanthropy and Public Needs — known as the Filer Commission after its chair, John H. Filer of Aetna Life and Casualty — conducted the first comprehensive study of American philanthropy and voluntary organizations. Its 1975 report, Giving in America, effectively named a unified "nonprofit sector" for the first time. The national nonprofit Independent Sector was formed in 1980 from the Commission's recommendations.
Why it matters: Before the Filer Commission, there were organizations — but no sector, no shared identity, no career field, no professional infrastructure. Naming the sector was the first step toward professionalizing it. (Learning to Give; Independent Sector)
1980s: Reagan Cuts Force Professionalization
What happened: Reagan-era reductions in federal social program funding forced organizations that had relied on government money to compete for foundation grants and government contracts to survive. Competing meant professionalizing — hiring development staff, producing outcome reports, and adopting business management language.
Why it matters: Organizations built by community organizers began hiring professional managers. The skills that had built them — community relationships, local knowledge, trust — were supplemented by and sometimes replaced by grant-writing, compliance reporting, and strategic planning. "No margin, no mission" entered the sector's vocabulary.
1982: Grassroots Fundraising Journal Founded
What happened: Kim Klein and Lisa Honig co-founded the Grassroots Fundraising Journal — a bimonthly publication written specifically for organizations with no staff, no front money, and no infrastructure. It documented a fundraising tradition that had existed only as oral knowledge in communities.
Why it matters: The Journal named the tension directly: the existing literature served large institutions. Organizations doing community work had been invisible to the professional literature. The word "grassroots" in the title was a clear choice. (Grassroots Fundraising Journal Archive) The complete historical collection and selected writings are preserved online through the Nonprofit Quarterly and the dedicated Grassroots Fundraising Journal Archive. Key articles have been compiled into books like Raise More Money: The Best of the Grassroots Fundraising Journal.
1990–2001: Academic Professionalization
What happened: The number of universities offering a graduate concentration in nonprofit management grew from 17 to 97. By 2001, 242 institutions offered courses in nonprofit management.
Why it matters: The sector had become a career path. A generation of professional managers replaced many of the community organizers who had founded the sector's organizations. The skills being taught — strategic planning, financial management, and outcome measurement — were valuable. The community relationships they supplemented were not in the curriculum. (Wish and Mirabella, cited in Philanthropy Roundtable, 2003)
2009: Academic Confirmation
What happened: Hwang and Powell published "The Rationalization of Charity" in Administrative Science Quarterly (Vol. 54, No. 2) — the definitive academic study of what professionalization had done to the sector.
Why it matters: Their finding: as professionalization increased, community embeddedness tended to decrease. The sector had grown more capable and less connected at the same time. This was not a warning about future drift. It was a description of what had already happened.
2020s: The Reckoning
What happened: The January 2025 federal funding freeze exposed how deeply some nonprofits had become implementing arms of government rather than independent community organizations. Mission drift is named as a top concern by nonprofit leaders surveyed in 2024–2025.
Why it matters: The logical endpoint of a forty-year trajectory: organizations built to challenge the status quo had in many cases become dependent on it. The grassroots question is not historical. It is urgent. (Philanthropy Roundtable, August 2025)
What Grassroots Means in 2026
The timeline shows how our sector grew more capable but less connected at the same time. Hwang and Powell documented this reality in their 2009 study "The Rationalization of Charity" published in "Administrative Science Quarterly." As professionalization increased in the nonprofit sector, community embeddedness tended to decrease. We developed better management, better reporting, and better compliance capacity but moved further from the communities we had been built to serve.
That is the tension Chuck Selvaggio names when he says he is working from the reality in Nicaragua, not from nonprofit sector best practice research produced in the United States. He is not anti-professional, but rather pro-community—an important distinction.
DEFINITION: Allow me to offer a working definition of grassroots for 2026, as a framework for our future conversations: An organization is genuinely grassroots when the people it serves have real participatory power in what it does beyond serving as advisory board members or survey respondents, or consumer reps, but as decision-makers, donors, and directors of the work. Organizational size is not the determinant. Budget is not the determinant. The determinant is the power relationship between the organization and the community it says it serves.
Kim Klein's question is still the right one: does your funding base reflect the community you serve, or does it reflect the priorities of the funders you have learned to please?
Two Organizations — Two Points on a Spectrum
Neighbors to Nicaragua (neighborstonicaragua.com) was founded in 2012 by Chuck Selvaggio, a retired secondary school teacher, who traveled to Granada, Nicaragua in 2011 to study Spanish. On that trip he encountered homeless youth and it changed his life. Neighbors works in Nueva Esperanza — a barrio whose name means "new hope" — south of Granada, providing education through the Centro de Oportunidad literacy program, daily nutrition through the Comedor Sandeep Panwalker (which feeds 115 to 135 community members daily), medical and housing aid, and youth development programs. Donors consistently cite that nearly every dollar goes directly to the community. Neighbors motto is "Because We Can." Selvaggio is the founder and director. Neighbors is grassroots not because they are small, but because the power relationship between the organization and the community it serves has never been professionalized away.
By contrast, Partners in Health (pih.org) operates in more than 10 countries and has 18,000+ affiliated staff. By any conventional scale it is a large, professionalized global health organization. And yet its founding commitment — what co-founder Dr. Paul Farmer called accompaniment, borrowing the term from liberation theology — is structured around community health workers, local people who live among those they serve and are personally invested in their medical outcomes. The accompagnateurs at PIH are not outreach workers visiting communities. They are bridges between the community and the health system. Farmer's organizing principle — a preferential option for the poor — was not marketing language. It drove every major organizational decision from their work in Haiti in 1984 through Rwanda in 2005. (SSIR: ssir.org/articles/entry/nonprofit_leadership_lessons_from_dr_paul_farmer) PIH is grassroots because the communities it serves have structural power over how care is delivered to them.
The contrast between Neighbors to Nicaragua and Partners in Health is not about scale, but about whether the power relationship between the organization and the community it serves has been maintained — or professionalized away.
Questions Worth Asking
As promised, here are prompts offered to stimulate a conversation that your leadership team may find enriching to have. I offer them in the spirit of deeper conversation.
Who makes the real decisions in our organization — staff, board, or the people we serve?
When did our funding base last reflect the community our mission describes?
Would the people we serve recognize themselves in our grant applications?
What would we stop doing tomorrow if we followed only the community's priorities rather than our funders' reporting requirements?
Has our organization ever turned down money because accepting it would compromise our relationship with the community we serve?
Add your own ....
The word "grassroots" has been used to describe organizations of all types and styles, ones that run local programs, that started small, and others that simply want to sound connected to their communities. It has been stretched to cover territory that would not have been recognizable to Jane Addams, Dorothy Day, or the Panthers cooking breakfast in West Oakland.
Chuck Selvaggio (and Paul Farmer, too, when he was alive) knows what grassroots means because they work from the reality the word describes. The question each of us has to answer is whether we are too.
I welcome your views and experience in the comments section at laurencepagnoni.com
This post is offered freely for educational purposes. Please share it with executive directors, board members, development staff, and colleagues who may find it useful — provided the author's byline remains intact: By Laurence A. Pagnoni, MPA. For more on nonprofit fundraising, governance, and strategy, visit laurencepagnoni.com.
