Grassroots Organizations Operating Together in Sisterhood

Vision
To develop, over time, a movement giving voice and power to grassroots women's local visions and initiatives, attracting long term partners, and creating new policies, to expand and strengthen their leadership.

Network Focus
GROOTS operates as a flexible network linking leaders and groups in poor rural and urban areas in the South and the North. To nurture relationships of mutual support and solidarity among women engaged in redeveloping their communities, the network is open to grassroots groups and their partners who share a commitment to four basic goals:

To strengthen women's participation in the development of communities and the approaches to problem solving.
To help urban and rural grassroots women's groups identify and share their successful development approaches and methods globally.
To focus international attention on grassroots women's needs and capabilities.
To increase the opportunities for local womens' groups and leaders to network directly across national boundaries.

In recognition that member groups give first priority and most of their time to strengthening women's local efforts, GROOTS strategies and plans are designed to complement and upscale development, training, organizing and advocacy activities already underway. Groups have been particularly interested in peer learning exchanges and documentation that share and transfer women-led strategies regarding:

ways for groups to expand their range of activities, foster participation, grow, mentor, and learn and link with others for greater effectiveness;
community livelihoods, enterprise, marketing, and micro finance strategies
housing, sanitation, water, transport and other infrastructure improvements
community accountable children and family support services (childcare, affordable education, healthcare, shared care giving and natural medicines for sick family members, etc.), and
strengthening women's direct involvement in local government's planning, implementation, and monitoring processes

History
The vision of GROOTS emerged in 1985 at the Third U.N. World Women's Conference in Nairobi when six community organizers from India, Kenya, Cameroon, the Philippines and the U.S. discussed how absent grassroots women were from this and other agenda setting arenas where policy makers and government officials gather to debate how to reduce poverty and social exclusion.

Four years later, GROOTS was launched by 20 community leaders from around the world who planned a global network to support grassroots women's organizations working across national and regional boundaries, sharing resources, information, and experiences and collectively forging and consolidating a grassroots women's presence and perspective.

GROOTS' founders created a strategic plan that targeted two United Nations conferences: the 1995 Fourth World Women Conference of Women's (FWCW) Equality, Development and Peace (Beijing) and the 1996 Habitat II: City Summit (Istanbul). Outreaching, sharing information and organizing regional events, women's groups came together to prepare presentations and priorities reflecting their bottom up solutions to reducing poverty, improving their communities quality of life, and supporting women's long term involvement in planning and local political decision making and inputted them into the regional and international platforms (and plans) for action.

The network's efforts culminated in China in a Grassroots' Women's Tent hosted by GROOTS representatives from each region--Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, South Pacific, Europe and North America--that attracted a thousand women to exchange workshops, informal information sharing, and leadership support circles. With the United Nations Development Program, GROOTS co-published: Restructuring Economic and Social Policy: Cross-Cultural Gender Insights from the Grassroots (a report featuring three case examples of GROOTS members who had created pro-active economic alternatives to the pressures of economic reform) that was launched as one of six UNDP sponsored conference workshops in Huairou. At the Istanbul U.N. Habitat II meeting, GROOTS had gained the capacity to offer a three day exchange workshop, host a series of topic specific panels, operate the first UN conference childcare center, place a number of grassroots leaders on their countries national delegations, and persuade government officials to sponsor Plan of Action commitments to include poor women's groups in human settlements planning and implementation.

In 1996, Steering Committee members met and evaluated GROOTS' seven years and agreed the network had: helped increase the respect and recognition for their local work, connected them to groups with similar goals (in and outside their region), and exposed them to information, support, and resources that reduced isolation and expanded longer term opportunities for their groups and networks. A decision was also taken to shift GROOTS' international networking approach from regionally-centered organizing (appropriate for global conferences) to inter-regional cooperation on specific programs (which strengthens capacity and relationship building). The priority issues, relevant today, are summarized in the Network Focus section, and the networking methods chosen include: peer learning exchanges, documentation, leadership support, group-group technical assistance, as well as ongoing regional communication and workshops.

2000-2002 GROOTS Activities
(resourced by leveraging network and member funding as well as in-kind and partner contributions)

Fostering Peer Learning Opportunities Among Grassroots Women's Groups
To energize leaders, identify shared development principles and processes and accelerate innovation, GROOTS supports exchange visits among member groups who identify approaches they want to learn from, and teach, one another. In some cases, a number of groups elect to learn from certain large scale member initiatives (savings and credit groups and federations, community foundations, mother centers, and post-disaster re-development strategies for example) and in others, groups decide to plan multi year/multi-country visits to deepen connections and extend their learning to understanding how cultural, economic, political and social factors shape grassroots women's development opportunities and challenges.

Identifying, Publicizing and Consolidating Women's Local Knowledge and Innovative Practice
GROOTS supports grassroots women's groups to document local strategies and programs they have created that improved the quality of life for women, families and community so they can be recognized and linked to their peers. The Grassroots Women's International Academy (GWIA) is a global event, co-sponsored by GROOTS, where grassroots women's groups come together in week long peer training workshops to share, question, and explore applying each other's local accomplishments. Partners with institutional influence are invited as commentators who are asked to strategize how their organization can resource these efforts and help expand their number and influence. As grassroots women's groups use these methods to increase their own knowledge of the range of creative responses women are advancing in this movement, GROOTS helps to facilitate additional peer learning and advocacy opportunities that will extend and sustain this spiral.

Supporting Grassroots Women's Groups to Effectively Participate in Local Decision Making, Local Governance
As governments decentralize and localize responsibilities around the world, GROOTS members think systems of public power must shift their approach to women from a blind or a numerical one (counting the # of places women hold in decision making structures) to inclusive, qualitative ones where local associations of poor women must be given some power to plan, implement and allocate significant resources solutions to their own problems. Towards this end, the network supports a range of local, national and inter-regional activities to strengthen how women are interfacing with government development agencies, local planning and budgeting bodies, political parties, and citizen activist groups to implement their plans and priorities. As this occurs, we share across the network the issues and strategies that are helping or hindering women in working across divisions and in building strong groups that are recognized both for their constituency and competency

Mainstreaming Women's Priorities and Expertise in Policy Making Arenas (local-national-global)
GROOTS continues to maintain its presence and involvement in monitoring the implementation of UN commitments to improve the status of women, promote sustainable human settlements, and safeguard the environment through a range of local, national and international activities. As founding members of the Huairou Commission, we are particularly active in advising the United Nations Commission on Human Settlements and partnering to foster grassroots women's participation and contributions to their Best Practices and Good Governance campaigns. In the context of globalization, GROOTS members are working to define and attract support for pro-poor trade and investment, alternative community economic and infrastructure approaches, and the expansion of micro-finance instruments to support and upscale poor women's collective activities. The network publicizes policy and agenda setting events (regionally and globally) and supports grassroots women's groups in gaining access and opportunities to formally participate as experts in discussions on poverty reduction, rural and urban development, the privatization of basic services, and the partnerships and citizen participation required to promote transparent, effective, gender equitable governance systems.

Working Values and Principles
In GROOTS, we:

respect the independence and autonomy of all local member groups and therefore agree to collaborate on global work plans that promote our common goals, and to avoid getting involved in the internal affairs of our respective members.
respect cultural, racial, ethnic, religious, regional, and other forms of diversity as a source of richness and resource in our network and thus try to work in inclusive, participatory ways that honor them.
respect and publicize the practical knowledge, skills, and expertise that grassroots women acquire from their real life experiences as mothers, wives, daughters, income generators, community caretakers, and day-to-day problem solvers, in money scarce situations. To consolidate and apply this experience we therefore:
help women expand and link local women's organizations (nationally, regionally and globally).
dialogue and partner with governments, donors, researchers, politicians, and policy makers to include grassroots women's groups as co-planners of a range of housing, livelihoods, infrastructure, childcare, and other development initiatives and investments underway in their communities.

GROOTS has received support from international and local agencies, private donations and in-kind contributions. Among the most recent are: the Ford Foundation, Novib, the United Nations Development Program (SUTCDC, GIDP, and UNIFEM), the United Nations Commission on Human Settlements, the Stanley Foundation, and the Methodist Board of Global Ministries. ___________________________________________________________________________

http://www.groots.org/about.htm - Important: Please click website Link to access references.

GROOTS INTERNATIONAL MEMBER GROUPS

GROOTS Canada	Canada
COMMUNAL INITIATIVE GROUP OF THE WOMEN FARMERS OF BOGSO	Cameroon
ALIANZA de MUJERES COSTARRICENSE	Costa Rica
COMITE DE EMERGENCIA GARIFUNA	Honduras
Czech Mothers Centers	Czech Republic
German Mother Centers	Germany
SSP	India
CWEI	Ireland
SISTREN THEATRE COLLECTIVE	Jamaica
GROOTS Kenya	Kenya
INTERNATIONAL WOMEN COMMUNICATION CENTER (IWCC)	Nigeria
MOKOSOI GRASSROOTS WOMEN'S ASSOCIATION	Papua New Guinea
FOUNDATION FOR THE SUPPORT OF WOMEN'S WORK	Turkey
THE NATIONAL CONGRESS OF NEIGHBORHOOD WOMEN (NW)	USA
ORANIZATION OF RURAL ASSOCIATIONS FOR PROGRESS - ORAP	Zimbabwe