Our Approach

THE ISSUE

In post-conflict East Africa, women have great responsibility for the wellbeing of their communities. Yet, they have the fewest resources and face individual and systemic barriers to create positive change.

The United Nations estimates that between 250,000 and 500,000 women were sexually assaulted during the 1994 Rwandan genocide. According to Amnesty International, 67% of these women contracted HIV. Post-conflict, women are often left as widows to assume the traditional roles of men in rebuilding their lives and their country, while caring for their children and even the orphans of their neighbors. Focused on daily survival, they often are unable to attend to their own emotional and physical rehabilitation needs.

As the primary caretakers of their communities, women also have the greatest insight into issues facing women and their underlying root causes. Unfortunately, they often have the least representation and access to the education and resources needed to address these challenges. While microfinance exists, it rarely provides the level of funding necessary to tackle systemic social issues such as domestic violence, rape, illiteracy, or sexual exploitation of women in exchange for basic needs. Further, such sizeable start-up debt would strain early-stage social ventures from their social purpose as they struggle to generate the revenue necessary for ongoing operating costs. For these emerging change agents, there are almost no opportunities to obtain the training and support necessary to launch their grassroots social ventures. Global Grassroots helps these women help themselves via the tools of Conscious Social Change.

The Solution

Global Grassroots equips emerging women leaders, including war widows, subsistence farmers, survivors of violence, and high-achieving female students from disadvantaged circumstances with the personal tools and professional resources to turn their ideas into reality. Through our Academy for Conscious Change, these powerful change agents launch sustainable social impact ventures in their own communities. Each women-led venture is designed to be mindful, innovative, sustainable, and impactful at the systemic and root levels of a social issue. Upon completion, they bring clean water, health education, gender equity training, and other holistic solutions to thousands of people each year. As their partners and champions, we celebrate their leadership. 

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 Conscious Social Change

Conscious Social Change is a methodology that uses mindfulness as a design tool for solving social issues. Our unique curricular and social venture incubator approach blends leadership training in five essential domains with hands-on, experiential learning for women-led teams of adults and individual young women who are committed to creating positive social change in their communities.

Trauma Healing

At Global Grassroots, we recognize the potential for unintentionally doing harm if we engage in social change work without self-awareness and compassion. We commit to bringing trauma-awareness — and an emphasis on balancing “outer work” with a commitment to care for self and others — to all that we do. Our curriculum introduces participants to Breath-Body-Mind (BBM), an evidence-based program designed to help anyone learn how to simply and effectively find a greater sense of ease and calmness in their lives. BBM has been shown to reduce symptoms of Post-Traumatic Stress and to increase nervous system regulation, and offers participants a practical tool for self-care and healing.

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The need for more conscious approaches to social change efforts is increasingly acknowledged among change leaders worldwide. Initiatives such as the UNDPs Conscious Food Systems Alliance (CoFSA) and the Inner Development Goals (IDGs) are just two examples. We are honored and inspired to part of these efforts and hope to contribute to the growing understanding of how inner work can positively impact our collective capacity to create healthy, equitable, just, and sustainable communities.

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