From Plan To Reality: Building Grassroots Capacity

Dear Kyle,

Grassroots engagement plans do not execute themselves. It takes staff, volunteers, and resources to turn a plan into action. Otherwise, the plan sits on the shelf, gets lonely, and wistfully laments its unmet potential.

At grassroots solutions, we don’t just write engagement plans, hand them off to our clients, and then walk away. On the other hand, we also don’t want to become permanent consultants (well, of course we love our clients, but it’s just not good for them!). What we DO want is to give our clients the practical help they need to get their plans into the field and online with all due speed, so they can meet their immediate objectives and build sustainable internal capacity at the same time.

Turning Plans Into Reality

After a planning assignment, we offer coaching assistance and trouble-shooting for a few months, which is sometimes all it takes to help a client get a plan off the ground. Other times, organizations decide they need additional permanent staff to translate their new plans into reality. They turn to grassroots solutions for hands-on help with recruiting and training new staff, who will then take over the new engagement plans and make them their own.

While we’re on clients’ speed dial for staffing up canvasses and political campaigns who have to put people on the ground fast, fewer people know about the recruitment and hiring assistance we regularly provide to our organizational clients. We've helped hire dozens of field directors, campaign managers, directors of community engagement, and organizers for clients who want to build their own capacities to take on long-term engagement work.

Staffing For Success

In the fall of 2008, grassroots solutions developed a grassroots campaign plan for the Sunflower Foundation that served as a roadmap for pursuing a comprehensive statewide smoke free policy effort in Kansas. Knowing that on the ground organizing work takes enormous capacity, we helped the Foundation identify and hire a campaign manager to run the Clean Air Kansas campaign and also screened applicants for a full-time organizer position. A comprehensive smoke free policy passed in the spring of 2010, due in large part to the talent and dedication of the Clean Air Kansas campaign staff.

grassroots solutions also worked with the National Association of Consumer Bankruptcy Attorneys (NACBA) in the winter of 2010 to develop a plan to more deeply engage their over 5,000 members in their public policy efforts. To support this new scope of organizing work, we encouraged the Association to invest in additional staff capacity to execute their new engagement program. grassroots solutions ran the initial search and screening efforts for a full-time field director. The Association recently brought in an experienced staff person who is now working to put the program infrastructure in place, with the help of on-going strategic consultation from grassroots solutions.

Your Own Grassroots HR Department

Hiring staff can be a very time consuming process for an organization that’s already stretched thin, so the grassroots solutions’ team handles all the logistics including:

Drafting and posting job descriptions
Compiling resumes
Screening candidates and conducting interviews
Recommending final candidates

Once new staff members have been hired, clients often request that grassroots solutions train them, ensuring they are grounded in the grassroots engagement plans they’ll be implementing. After that, we’re often used as training wheels for a few months, acting as a sounding board while new staff members become familiar with their engagement brief. Before we know it, the training wheels come flying off as we witness the plan morphing into a full-fledged reality.