Mission, Vision, Values
“Before I met Global Grassroots, I was not aware of my inner-power. Through Global Grassroots’ programs, I discovered that I am a powerful woman: to me, to my family, and to others.”
— THACIENNE NYIRANEZA, RWANDA PROGRAM ASSOCIATE
Our Mission
To catalyze women and girls as leaders of conscious social change in their communities.
our vision
Women and girls in post-conflict and underserved communities of East Africa will have the capacity and resources to bring their own social change ideas to fruition as sustainable, impactful, and mindful organizations; and, Conscious Social Change will represent a new movement for collaborative, inner-driven change, worldwide.
Our values
We recognize the innate power of individuals and communities to determine their own social issue priorities and solutions to achieve wellbeing for all.
We value the most marginalized, least resourced change agents as our partners, especially women survivors of violence.
We value a culture of wellbeing for all people, defined by individuals and communities for themselves.
We embrace our social and environmental responsibility.
We strive to be mindful and transformative.
Theory of Change
-
Making a unique contribution for the greater good can be deeply meaningful, even healing, especially from the trauma of war, genocide, and sexual violence. In turn, when an individual interested in creating social change works to deepen their self-awareness, they have a greater likelihood of making mindful decisions, unobstructed or distorted by personal agenda, ego, or abuse of power.
-
Global Grassroots embraces the potential for every person to become an agent of change. We have learned that it is women who are most invested in serving their community's needs yet traditionally have had the least access to the support they need to do so. We believe these women, if guided by mindfulness practice, will drive optimal societal transformation.
-
We realize there are certain systems, tools, and support structures that can help accelerate societal transformation. This includes exposure to mindfulness practices, training in social venture design and management, financial services, human resources, information networks, forums for ideas transfer, access to healing practitioners, access to technology, and other services. Global Grassroots is working to build the support structures necessary to drive Conscious Social Change.
-
Endeavors that give a voice to the disempowered, allow her to identify her value to her community, and realize her capacity to change the aspects of community that failed her - provide a deeply powerful path for healing.
GLOBAL GRASSROOTS HISTORY
In 2004, founder Gretchen Steidle went to South Africa to research the HIV/AIDS issue, eager to convince the country's largest corporations to invest in the innovative work of social entrepreneurs combating the disease. She spent a month crisscrossing the country, interviewing social workers, health care workers, NGOs, Ashoka's social entrepreneurs, academics, business leaders, and individuals.
While there, Gretchen met a young woman named Zolecka Ntuli in the Crossroads township outside of Cape Town. They sat together in the extreme heat of her one-room corrugated metal shack. Zolecka told of how she was shocked when a 12-year old neighborhood girl was raped by a group of young boys who thought it was their right to have sex with her because she was their girlfriend. Despite being unemployed, Zolecka started a grassroots support group to combat sexual violence. She bought bread with some loose change and invited 15 women to start a dialogue about the issue of child rape. By the time Gretchen met her six months later, Zolecka and 60 community members - including 15 men - were meeting three times a week to talk about the issue. Zolecka began generating income through beadwork and HIV ribbons, so she could provide some food, often the only meal her members might eat that day. Zolecka put herself through training programs so that she could better educate others and soon she was training both women and men to become educators too. Each step of the way, she evolved her approach.
Zolecka, then just 25 years old, knew what she was meant to do to help her community.
Gretchen learned on that trip that women and girls in grassroots communities throughout the country already knew what they needed to do to protect themselves from contracting HIV. But they did not have the economic freedom, sexual rights, or personal voice to decide when, where, how, and with whom to have sex. Gretchen also learned that the single greatest obstacle in the fight against the spread of HIV was not the lack of corporate investment but a woman's powerlessness - until a woman had the courage to step forward to address the issue head-on, such as Zolecka Ntuli.
Gretchen knew then that she wanted to dedicate her work towards helping emerging change makers within these marginalized populations of women advance their own ideas for social change. Shortly after her journey to South Africa, she founded Global Grassroots to provide training, funding, and advisory support for grassroots change agents, like Zolecka Ntuli, working to advance social justice for the world's most vulnerable women and girls.
At the same time in 2004 that Gretchen was sitting with Zolecka Ntuli, her brother, a former US Marine Captain named Brian Steidle, left the US to begin work as a military observer in Sudan. Over the next 12 months, he shared with her via email and satellite phone, his firsthand accounts of the Darfur crisis as he went out each day, unarmed, to visit bombed out villages and take testimonies from women who had been gang-raped and whose husbands had been executed.
Since early 2003, Government of Sudan soldiers and its unofficially-backed "Janjaweed" Arab nomad militias have carried out a campaign of terror against Darfur's non-Arab tribes. Experts estimate at least 400,000 have been killed, approximately 2.5 million have been displaced within Darfur, and hundreds of thousands of others have crossed the desert to arrive safely in Chad. To date, peace has yet to be achieved.
Gretchen was deeply affected by the sexual violence she learned was taking place in Darfur. Doctors Without Borders estimates that 82% of rapes, predominately gang rapes, occur during daily chores – when women venture into the desert away from the camps or villages to collect water or firewood. These women risk rape daily to avoid starvation. The stigma surrounding rape is so significant that women are frequently abandoned by their husbands or families with shame because they are considered "tainted" and "unmarriageable", arrested for illegal pregnancies under Sudan's law, forced to undergo virginity testing, and later exploited further in captivity.
Upon her brother's return from Darfur, Gretchen worked to help expose his story and photographs to the media, including The New York Times, U.S. Congress and national advocacy groups. When the media interest waned, she and Brian decided a documentary film would be the only way to reach the broader public. Joining forces with filmmakers Annie Sundberg and Ricki Stern and producer Jane Wells, Brian and Gretchen traveled to the Darfur refugee camps of Eastern Chad in June 2005 to shoot footage for The Devil Came on Horseback.
During this journey, Gretchen sought to find if ideas existed at the grassroots level among the world's most vulnerable - illiterate widows, sexual assault victims, and genocide survivors - to address social issues not being met by existing aid. She found more grassroots ideas, including those of visionary Adam Mussa, a Fur refugee English teacher working to build a human rights library to fight against domestic violence and child abuse. Others wanted a school cafeteria so that girls would stay in school as opposed to going home to cook lunch. The ideas addressed urgent social priorities but were not yet fully developed. Gretchen next set about to design a social entrepreneurship training program to provide the skills necessary to help these change agents initiate their grassroots solutions.
The first training curriculum was established in collaboration with MBA students Lauren Purnell and Will Parker from the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College. In October 2006, Gretchen launched her training program in Rwanda among an association of 60 genocide widows with HIV caring for 227 orphans. Gretchen decided to focus her work on post-conflict, where women were tasked with the difficulties of rebuilding the fabric of society after genocide.
In Rwanda, nearly one million people were killed in 100 days during the 1994 genocide. The UN estimates that 250,000 - 500,000 women were also raped, many by known HIV-infected men. At the end of the genocide, the government estimated women made up 70% of the population, left to assume the roles of men in heading households, rebuilding lives, caring for orphans, and trying to heal from trauma, grief, and physical wounds. It is among these same marginalized women that Gretchen found extraordinary courage, steadfast resolve, and legitimate solutions to advance social change for women.
Read about why Global Grassroots operates in post-conflict Africa.
Back in 2002, even before Gretchen had decided to travel to South Africa, she was also beginning an important personal journey. Originally inspired by one of her professors at Tuck, Ella Bell, who introduced her to the concept of "deep change" within self and organizations, Gretchen began to invest in her own self-awareness work. She began to study and practice an alternative healing modality called Integrative Breathwork, developed by Jessica Dibb of the Inspiration Community in Owings Mills, MD. She even traveled as far as Mae Rim, Chiang Mai, Thailand to study meditation and Engaged Buddhism with Women for Peace and Justice in 2007.
Throughout these personal experiences, Gretchen has come to believe that cultivating inner awareness and contributing to the common good are both necessary to advance the greatest level of positive social change. Gretchen is now a therapeutic practitioner of Integrative Breathwork which she uses to help heal trauma from war and sexual violence. Informed by her commitment to personal transformation, Gretchen continues to deepen her practice, thinking, and teachings on Conscious Social Change, the core of Global Grassroots' program for marginalized women worldwide.
Our Team
“I’ve always believed in inner-driven change — that decisions made with the greatest level of awareness will ensure the wisest response and most potent, effective results. I’ve now spent more than a decade training in the fields of personal transformation, meditation, and alternative healing. Bringing my passions together, I founded Global Grassroots in 2004 to advance what I call Conscious Social Change among grassroots, marginalized women.”
Gretchen Steidle
OUR FOUNDER
Gretchen Steidle's inspiration for her work with women in developing countries first stirred in her as a child when her military family was transferred to the Philippines where she discovered the difficulties of poverty. She graduated in 1996 with a BA in foreign affairs from the University of Virginia, where she attended as a Jefferson Scholar. From 1996-1999 Gretchen worked in international project finance for PMD International, Inc., a boutique investment banking firm specializing in infrastructure development in poor countries. She returned for her MBA (2001) at the Tuck School at Dartmouth College, where she helped to found what is now Tuck's Center for Business and Society. After Tuck, she joined Ashoka: Innovators for the Public, an international non-profit organization advancing the profession of social entrepreneurship. Gretchen was responsible for leading the launch of an incubator for social entrepreneurs and was invited to direct Ashoka's sister organization, Youth Venture.
In 2004, Gretchen established and now leads Global Grassroots. Gretchen is a producer of the three-time Emmy-nominated documentary film, The Devil Came on Horseback, about her brother's tenure as a military observer in Darfur, Sudan, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2007. She is also co-author of her brother's memoir, titled The Devil Came on Horseback: Bearing Witness to the Genocide in Darfur, published by PublicAffairs in 2007. That same year, Gretchen was honored by World Business Magazine and Shell as one of the top International 35 Women Under 35. In 2010 she was honored as a CNN Hero in Haiti for her work providing support for survivors of the earthquake, and was also recently nominated for a national CNN Hero Award. In the same year she was awarded the inaugural Susan J. Herman Award for Leadership in Holocaust and Genocide Awareness by the Cohen Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Keene State College. In 2011 she was chosen one of seven Remarkable Women of the World by New Hampshire Magazine. Gretchen is a certified practitioner of the alternative healing modality Integrative Breathwork and is trained in Coherent Breathwork, which she utilizes in her work in Haiti, Rwanda, and Uganda to help women and children heal trauma from war, disaster, and sexual violence. She regularly conducts workshops on Conscious Social Change at leading wellness institutions, including Kripalu and the Omega Institute, has brought her work to universities including Dartmouth College and the University of Virginia as an accredited semester-length graduate and undergraduate course, and speaks nationally on leadership, mindfulness, and social entrepreneurship in post-war Africa. Her newest book, Leading from Within: Conscious Social Change and Mindfulness for Social Innovation was published in 2017 by MIT Press.
Board Members
Tori McLeod, Vice Chair
Associate, Eagle Hill Consulting, USA
Gretchen Ki Steidle, Treasurer
Founder, Global Grassroots and Circles for Conscious Change, USA
Arthi Rabikrisson, MBA, ACC-ICF
Founder and MD, Prerna Advisory, South Africa
Michael T. Sullivan
Founder, MTS Advisory LLC, USA
Sara Taggart
Founder, Inner Work Strategy & Learning LLC, USA
Additionally, we would like to wholeheartedly appreciate the many individuals who have donated their time and talents immeasurably as Former Staff & Board Members to ensure the development of Global Grassroots since 2006.
Donors & Partners
We’d like to thank the many, many individuals and organizations who helped Global Grassroots deliver on its mission for 17 years. Your contributions, support and partnership - and the relationships that bloomed from those - matter greatly to us, and we hope will continue as other Conscious Social Change models continue to develop around the globe.
