In the United States, some populations suffer from far greater disparities in health than others. Those disparities are caused not only by fundamental differences in health status across segments of the population, but also because of inequities in factors that impact health status, so-called determinants of health. Only part of an individual's health status depends on his or her behavior and choice; community-wide problems like poverty, unemployment, poor education, inadequate housing, poor public transportation, interpersonal violence, and decaying neighborhoods also contribute to health inequities, as well as the historic and ongoing interplay of structures, policies, and norms that shape lives. When these factors are not optimal in a community, it does not mean they are intractable: such inequities can be mitigated by social policies that can shape health in powerful ways. Communities in Action: Pathways to Health Equity seeks to delineate the causes of and the solutions to health inequities in the United States. This report focuses on what communities can do to promote health equity, what actions are needed by the many and varied stakeholders that are part of communities or support them, as well as the root causes and structural barriers that need to be overcome.

INTRODUCTION, AN OVERVIEW OF THE PARTNERSHIP AMONG GRASSROOTS ORGANIZATION, APPROACHES AND STRATEGIES ADOPTED BY NON-GOVERNMENT ORGANIZATIONS, ASSESSMENT OF GRASSROOTS PARTNERSHIP, BEST PRACTICES OF GRASSROOTS PARTNERSHIP, FINDINGS, CONCLUSIONS AND POLICY IMPLICATIONS.

A roadmap for integrating mindfulness into every aspect of social change: how to lead transformation with compassion for the needs and perspectives of all people. Gretchen Steidle knows first-hand the personal transformation that mindfulness practice can bring. But she doesn't believe that transformation stops at personal wellbeing. In Leading from Within, Steidle describes the ways that personal investment in self-awareness shapes leaders who are able to inspire change in others, build stronger relationships, and design innovative and more sustainable solutions. Steidle argues that both personal and societal transformation are essential for a just society, and with this book she offers a roadmap for integrating mindfulness into every aspect of social change. Conventional methods attempt to compel people to change through incentives or punitive measures. Conscious social change calls for leading with a deeper human understanding of change and compassion for the needs and perspectives of all stakeholders. Steidle offers mindfulness practices for individuals and groups, presents the neuroscientific evidence for its benefits, and argues for its relevance to social change. She describes five capacities of conscious social change, devoting a chapter to each. She writes about her own experiences, including her work helping women to found their own grassroots social ventures in post-conflict Africa. She describes the success of a group of rural, uneducated women in Rwanda, for example, who now provide 9,000 villagers with clean water, ending the sexual exploitation of disabled women unable to collect water on their own. Steidle also draws from the work of change agents in the United States to showcase applications of conscious social change to timely issues like immigration, racism, policing, and urban violence. Through personal stories and practical guidance, Steidle delivers both the inspiration and tools of this innovative approach to social transformation. About Global Grassroots: In post-conflict Africa, Global Grassroots equips emerging women leaders, including war survivors, subsistence farmers, and the undereducated, with the tools and resources to create conscious social change. Our core program is our Academy for Conscious Change, a social entrepreneurship and mindfulness-based leadership program that helps vulnerable women design their own non-profit solutions to address priority social issues. In our first decade of operations we have trained over 650 change agents who have designed 150 civil society organizations benefiting over 150,000 people.

The nation’s approach to managing environmental policy and protecting natural resources has shifted from the national government’s top down, command and control, regulatory approach, used almost exclusively in the 1970s, to collaborative, multi-sector approaches used in recent decades to manage problems that are generally too complex, too expensive, and too politically divisive for one agency to manage or resolve on its own. Governments have organized multi-sector collaborations as a way to achieve better results for the past two decades. We know much about why collaboration occurs. We know a good deal about how collaborative processes work. Collaborations organized, led, and managed by grassroots organizations are rarer, though becoming more common. We do not as yet have a clear understanding of how they might differ from government led collaborations. Hampton Roads, Virginia, located at the southern end of the Chesapeake Bay, offers an unusual opportunity to study and draw comparative lessons from three grassroots environmental collaborations to restore three rivers in the watershed, in terms of how they build, organize and distribute social capital, deepen democratic values, and succeed in meeting ecosystem restoration goals and benchmarks. This is relevant for the entire Chesapeake Bay watershed, but is also relevant for understanding grassroots collaborative options for managing, protecting, and restoring watersheds throughout the U.S. It may also provide useful information for developing grassroots collaborations in other policy sectors. The premise underlying this work is that to continue making progress toward achieving substantive environmental outcomes in a world where the problems are complex, expensive, and politically divisive, more non-state stakeholders must be actively involved in defining the problems and developing solutions. This will require more multi-sector collaborations of the type that governments have increasingly relied on for the past two decades. Our approach examines one subset of environmental collaboration, those driven and managed by grassroots organizations that were established to address specific environmental problems and provide implementable solutions to those problems, so that we may draw lessons that inform other grassroots collaborative efforts.

This volume explores the world of grassroots organizations and outlines their history while differentiating them from the more familiar paid-staff nonprofit organizations. David Horton Smith, a leading scholar on the nonprofit and voluntary sector, examines the available empirical research on the topic and analyzes the theoretical concepts that have come to define such associations. He affords the reader a complete, detailed description of the nature and characteristics of grassroots organizations, their formation, structure, leadership, life cycle, effectiveness, and their integral role in postmodern societies.

An account of the formation and development of the Global Campaign for Education is followed by detailed case studies from Bangladesh, Egypt, the Philippines, Peru, and sub-Saharan Africa, illustrating a wide range of partnerships and raising crucial questions about power and control, scaling up, and sustainability.

This book explores women of color’s grassroots leadership in organizations that are not singularly identified with feminism. Centered in New York City, Pushing Back brings an intersectional perspective to communities of color as it addresses injustices tied to domestic work, housing, and environmental policies and practices. Ariella Rotramel shows how activists respond to injustice and marginalization, documenting the ways people of color and the working class in the United States recognize identity as key to the roots of and solutions to injustices such as environmental racism and gentrification. Rotramel further provides an in-depth analysis of the issues that organizations representing transnational communities of color identify as fundamental to their communities and how they frame them. Introducing the theoretical concept of “queer motherwork,” Rotramel explores the forms of advocacy these activists employ and shows how they negotiate internal diversity (gender, race, class, sexuality, etc.) and engage broader communities, particularly as women-led groups. Pushing Back highlights case studies of two New York–based organizations, the pan-Asian/American CAAAV: Organizing Asian Communities (formerly the Committee Against Anti- Asian Violence) and South Bronx’s Mothers on the Move/ Madres en Movimiento (MOM). Both organizations are small, women-led community organizations that have participated in a number of progressive coalitions on issues such as housing rights, workers’ rights, and environmental justice at the local, national, and global levels.