Grassroots Grantmakers

Grassroots Grantmakers is a network of people, organizations and institutions who believe that what people do together in their home communities matters.

Members of our network believe that when people see themselves and their neighbors as co-producers of community well-being, they create communities that are welcoming, vibrant, resilient and just.  In these communities the impulse for people to connect and act around shared interests is in the water, the local culture and the community’s muscle memory.

Our work is geared to growing a field of citizen sector investing that supports the work that everyday people do together to make their communities more welcoming, vibrant, resilient and just.  

Grassroots Grantmakers’ roots go back more than thirty years to a question that the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation was asking about possibilities for our communities if groups of people in low-income neighborhoods could be better resourced, better connected to information, and championed as contributors to community change and vitality.  At the time, the Mott Foundation was experimenting with various mechanisms for building the capacity of neighborhood groups in low-income neighborhoods.  The Community Foundations and Neighborhoods Small Grants Program was one such experiment, designed to test the potential role of community foundations, an emergent form of community-based philanthropy at that time, in resourcing and validating associational groups in distressed neighborhoods.  Our network began with the twenty-three community foundations that were part of that experiment, with an initial focus on practice questions that program officers were asking as they designed and managed small grants programs, the centerpiece capacity building tactic of the Mott Foundation’s program strategy.

Our network has evolved over the past twenty years, evolving from the Neighborhood Small Grants Network to Grassroots Grantmakers in 2005 and expanding our reach from community foundations to all place-based funders. 

In 2012, we launched another period of evolution, expanding our vision, membership approach and program strategies from sharing tools and practices to building a field of citizen sector investing.