Global

In the words of Grassroots International’s current board chair and former staff member Maria Aguiar, social movements realized in the early 1990s that “It was no longer a conversation about power in their own countries. It had to be global...We weren’t going to win anything without taking it up a notch – because we needed to fight against globalized powers now.”

In this evolving global context, Grassroots International shifted gears from a primary focus on national liberation to one on “alter-globalization” or “globalization from below.” This work has involved accompanying social movements to organize across multiple scales, from the local to the global, in a coordinated and strategic manner.

An inspiring example of this sort of organizing is the food sovereignty movement, which on the one hand involves producing and distributing food in ways that are intimately connected to local cultures and ecologies, and on the other hand involves global mobilizations and engagement in global policy spaces to wrest power in the food system from multinational corporations back to the people. Another example is globally articulated grassroots feminist organizing, which in recent years has been intersecting with food sovereignty organizing in powerful ways.

Grassroots International is honored to support the work of two of the world’s largest and most inspiring global social movements, La Via Campesina and World March of Women. We are also in the process of deepening our relationships with global movements of fishers and pastoralists and deepening our support for cross-movement coordination and convergence at the international level. These relationships have brought us into new regions of the world, new venues of struggle, and new, innovative models of community life and global movement building.