Report Publish Date: August 2022
This issue brief describes how grassroots and other community-based organizations are advocating for health and health equity in places participating in RWJF’s Sentinel Communities Surveillance project.
Begun in 2016, RWJF’s Sentinel Communities Surveillance project tracks how a Culture of Health is developing in 29 communities across the country. The authors wanted to know how grassroots organizations shift and influence power in communities, with the goal of boosting health and health equity.
The authors gathered information from phone interviews with Sentinel Community leaders; online, published, and local materials and media about the communities; and data sources including the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, the CDC’s Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, County Health Rankings, and state and local data collection systems.
Themes of the brief come from all 29 communities; the researchers pulled out specific examples from 10 communities: Adams County, Miss.; Allegheny County, Penn.; Butte, Mont.; Harris County, Texas; Louisville, Ky.; Milwaukee, Wis.; New Haven, Conn.; Oxford County, Maine; Tacoma, Wash.; and Toledo, Ohio.
“The examples in this report demonstrate the role of grassroots and other community-based organizations in providing insight about what is driving health inequities; keeping community concerns front and center; and helping to push for local change.”
—RAND Corporation
Grassroots organizations “are key to representing the voices of populations that have limited voice in formal community structures,” the authors write. Enabling such groups to mobilize fully is an important step toward advancing health equity.
Grassroots organizations and community-based organizations frequently use collective action from the local level to effect change at the local, national, and global levels. Social movements are galvanized by these organizations and these organizations are often led by populations that have been underrepresented and historically marginalized. In the United States, grassroots organizations have a rich history in advancing social and economic causes, and this mobilization has been central to responses to COVID-19, police brutality, environmental racism, and voting rights.
Building the capacity of grassroots organizations has long been a point of discussion within civil society, the government, and the philanthropic sector given the role and influence that grassroots organizations can exert. However, more recently, the focus on “base building” within grassroots and even slightly larger, community-based organizations, has gained momentum given interests in leveraging grassroots organizations to address growing social inequities. Base building includes many components, from growing the membership of organizations, rallying the membership, and activating the membership for collective action. There are now many strategies to engage grassroots activism both offline and online. New models of base building are examining the best ways to build capacity, coordinate across grassroots organizations for maximum community impact, and to determine how grassroots organizations are financially supported to sustain their activities. Further, discussions about grassroots organizations and base building also have included dialogue about how these approaches can shift the locus of community power to effect change. Power, sometimes defined as the ability to gain and maintain access to resources, is key to organizational sustainability and the ability of grassroots organizations to have both voice and agency in community decision-making.
This brief report describes the role of grassroots and other community-based organizations in a sample of the Sentinel Communities; the changing role of these organizations to address community health and health equity; and barriers and facilitators to their engagement and influence locally. The report considers the capacity and power of these examples as it relates to influence and impact in communities, but this report is not intended to be a fuller analysis of the concepts of base building and power, which would require more detailed data. The insights for this report come from environmental scans and stakeholder interviews conducted for the Sentinel Communities Surveillance Project.
Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, August 2022
This study and report was conducted and created by the following people.
