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Rethinking U.S. Food Aid Policy and Resource Rights

By: Carol Schachet | September 1, 2005

Current U.S. food aid policy makes responding to wide-spread hunger like the current conditions in Niger an opportunity for the U.S. agricultural industry to gain new markets.
A recent study by a Grassroots International Resource Rights Advisor, Kathleen McAfee, and Sophia Murphy of the Institute for Agricultural and Trade Policy (IATP), shows two distinct changes to the way U.S. food aid operates that could focus aid on saving lives rather than boosting sales for the U.S. agricultural industry.
They are: 1) provide cash, not U.S. produced food, to the U.N. World Food Programme and 2) support the World Food Programme'?s effort to buy food from regions adjacent to affected areas by not inundating local markets with U.S. food sales.
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Humanitarian Crises: What is a Progressive to do?

By: Nikhil Aziz | January 15, 2005

Tim Wise, former Executive Director of Grassroots International elaborated on this based on Grassroots' principles back in 2005 shortly after the Asian tsunami. Those pointers are just as relevant today. Progressive-minded people who want to contribute to humanitarian aid efforts too often abandon their progressive principles, particularly in crisis situations. Why? They want to help, and they want to do so quickly. And they focus on the service-delivery – food rations, medicines, shelter – rather than the service deliverers.
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Drawing Inspiration from High School Youth at the MET

By: Carol Schachet | November 24, 2004

Bringing GRI's message and the work of our partners to a public high school audience in Providence, Rhode Island is one of those things I wish we could be doing more of. So on Monday morning at the crack of dawn I got up, to lead an assembly or "Pick Me Up" as they called it, at one of the schools of the Met (Metropolitan Regional and Technical Center)–a unique state-funded public school K-12, that is structured around students individualized projects and skills development.
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Grassroots International at the Boston Social Forum

By: Carol Schachet | August 20, 2004

Grassroots was proud to participate in the first Boston Social Forum, which took place July 23-25 2004 at U Mass Boston. It was the first U.S.
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Global Justice Fund Completes $1 Million Goal

By: Grassroots International | August 11, 2004

In a challenging political and economic environment, Boston-based Grassroots International (GRI) announced today the successful completion of its $1 million Global Justice Fund.
“We launched this fund at the absolute trough of the recession and in a national political environment very hostile to international social change philanthropy,” said GRI Executive Director, Kevin Murray. “That we were successful says something important about the work of our international partners, and the ability of our donors to see the connection between global justice and real global security.”
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Notes from the Un-Convention

By: Kevin Murray | July 23, 2004

The Democratic National Convention is coming to Boston. Plans are in place to dramatically restrict vehicle and pedestrian traffic in the center city. Just yesterday, a judge said that the space being prepared to keep protestors "under wraps" resembled an internment camp, but he refused to order the police to re-think this radical restriction of the right to assembly. Life is good in the Cradle of Liberty. The jury is still out on whether or not any of this could prevent the feared terrorist attack, but turning Boston into a police state will surely keep thousands of people from exercising their democratic rights...such as they are.
Luckily, the DNC will not be the only political gathering in Boston during July's final days.
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“The people, together, are like a pool of wisdom. When you share that wisdom, the pool gets deeper.”

By: Jake Miller | July 23, 2004

As they prepared for their workshops and panels at the Boston Social Forum, I had a chance to talk with Paulo de Marck of the Brazilian Landless Workers Movement (MST) and Ruba Eid from the Democratic Wokers Rights Center (DWRC) in Ramallah, Palestine.
Paulo and Ruba have come to Boston to share stories from GRI's partner organizations, and to meet people engaged in similar struggles here in the States and around the world.
Why come all this way for a conference?
"The people, together, are like a pool of wisdom," Paulo said. "When you share that wisdom, the pool gets deeper."
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Organizing for a New Reality

By: Nisrin Elamin | June 15, 2004

By Nisrin Elamin
CNN and BBC headlines about Israeli withdrawals from Gaza, Iraqi sovereignty and Israel dropping Sharon's bribery case have made me feel like some people are living a different reality than the rest of us. Never mind, that two brutal occupations persist and that plans for withdrawal, handing back power and restoring democracy and justice seem further away from reality than ever. Can we let what happened in Gaza and Abu Ghraib fall through the cracks and into oblivion so quickly? Can we allow flagrant U.S. and Israeli violations of international laws to continue without organizing internal opposition and dissent?
Those were some of the questions I was thinking about on my way to the 3rd Annual National Organizer's Conference of the U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation that took place on June 4-7, 2004 in Washington D.C.
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U.S. Connivance Alone…

By: Kevin Murray | March 19, 2004

The people at globalissues.org provide some of the best information available on a wide range of human rights issues. Their page on Haiti is an incredible piece of research, but we believe that it could include a bit more reference to the views of those Haitian social change organizations that have opposed both ex-President Aristide and U.S. military intervention.
We share here our letter to the creators of this excellent site:
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We’ve Got Plans for Almost Anything You’d Want to Do in the World

By: Kevin Murray | February 13, 2004

Asked whether or not the U.S. had any plans to intervene in Haiti, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said just that on the 2/12 broadcast of NPR's "Evening Edition." The U.S., of course, has contingency plans for another invasion of Haiti, but has no plans to use those plans. Such talk makes Haitians nervous, and it should.
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