Grassroots Leadership (Organization)

Grassroots Leadership is a nationally recognized civil and human rights organization based in Austin, Texas fighting to end prison profiteering and reduce reliance on criminalization and detention through direct action, organizing, research, and public education.

Founded in 1980 in North Carolina by Si Kahn as a resource and training center for social justice organization building, Grassroots Leadership worked throughout the South to help build progressive, multi-racial organizations to both build power and create just organizations. Grassroots Leadership was one of the few organizations in the 1980s and 1990s to articulate in the board bylaws that no less than half of board would be women, no less than half would be People of Color.

In the 1990’s Grassroots Leadership spearheaded the Community Assets Campaign looking at the privatization of public resources as one of the phenomena that was rolling back many of the gains that the civil rights and labor movements had made in the 1960s and 1970s. The campaign initially focused on four forms of privatization — education, healthcare, water and utilities, and prisons. Recognizing the rise of mass incarceration and its disproportionate impact on African American communities, the campaign ultimately shifted to hone in on the private, for-profit prison industry and the fight against corporations profiting from the imprisonment of human beings.