Recognizing That Small Is Beautiful

Grant-making consortium nurtures low-budget environmental activism

In Brandon, Vt., Michael Shane was concerned that the constant rumble of 18-wheel trucks through that historic village was shattering its serenity and driving guests away from his nine-room country inn.

On Cape Cod, Mass., Susan Phelan feared that pesticides used on a neighbor’s cranberry bog would contaminate her well water. And in Wakefield, R.I., Bob Votava, a retired architect and urban planner, saw an abandoned railway line as a perfect location for a bicycle path that might help relieve the town’s traffic congestion.

Such kitchen-table activists with little or no organization behind them rarely win support from grant makers. Their track records are generally deemed too meager, their ideas too unconventional, and their financial needs too modest for most foundations to consider them eligible for a grant.

But in New England for the past four years, an unusual collaboration involving community activists and 10 foundations has aided those and scores of other concerned citizens who on their grant applications can boast of little more than a burning desire to put things right. In the process, say some observers, the novel effort is giving new hope to the unsung local militias of environmentalism, while also presenting a model that other regions of the country might wish to emulate.

The New England Grassroots Environment Fund offers help in several forms. Most tangible is money: Grants of up to $2,500 enable groups to buy equipment, stage an event, attend a conference, mount a campaign, or publish a brochure. But at least equally important, say many of its grantees, are the accompanying dollops of recognition, encouragement, and advice — as well as efforts to link their tiny organizations into a wider web by putting them in touch with one another.

Groups need not be registered as charities or have an office or even a bank account to be eligible for grants. Indeed, their annual budgets must not exceed $100,000, and they must employ no more than two paid staff members. Their programs can deal with issues as varied as air and water quality, land use, population, energy, and transportation.

Last year alone, the fund made 96 grants totaling $181,199. Sixty percent of the recipients have no paid staff people, and 37 percent are not incorporated as charities.

The grassroots fund has positioned itself at a vital crossroads where civic activism meets environmental problems, say some observers.

“A lot of environmental protection these days is taking place not at the national or state levels but at the community level,” says Matthew L. Wilson, who directs the Toxics Action Center, in Boston, which works with about 30 community groups. “NEGEF fills a huge niche in this increasing trend of communities’ realizing that they need to organize, to fight back, and to take responsibility for protecting their neighborhoods.”

And the fund’s admirers say it also plays a crucial role in keeping foundation grants flowing to groups at the bottom of the grant-making food chain.

“As foundations get larger and larger, they are not adding staff in sufficient number to allow them to make grants to many small organizations,” says Jim Abernathy, who directs the Environmental Support Center, in Washington, which provides technical help for such groups. Because foundations are not expanding their grant-making staffs to keep pace with their ballooning assets, he observes, average grant sizes are increasing — often to far beyond the modest needs of small organizations.

“The more foundation assets grow by leaps and bounds,” says Mr. Abernathy, “the harder it will be for grassroots groups to get any money out of them.”

One solution is for grant makers to underwrite intermediary organizations that in turn support small groups, Mr. Abernathy says. And the grassroots fund, he says, provides “an idea that should be extrapolated and taken around the country.”

The idea for the fund emerged from a series of meetings across New England in 1995 that were sponsored by four grant makers: the Jessie B. Cox Charitable Trust, the Island Foundation, the Henry P. Kendall Foundation, and the John Merck Fund. Activists, trustees, and staff members of environmental and public-health organizations met to discuss ways of better helping the flagging environmental movement, which was finding many of its proposals stymied at the national level, where Republicans had recently gained control of the House and Senate.

“We had this instinctual feeling that a lot of grassroots activity was going on that was not being recognized or supported by grant makers because of its size and informality,” recalls Jenny Russell, who was then with the Island Foundation and now directs the Merck Family Fund, in Milton, Mass. “We wanted to give it some prominence and credibility.”

Set up as a donor-advised fund at the New Hampshire Charitable Foundation, NEGEF enabled the donor foundations to make grants as small as several hundred dollars — far below the minimum grant size of $10,000 or so that most of them impose on their own grant making. From the start, the fund was committed to having activists play more than a token role in its deliberations. In fact, representatives from grassroots groups form a majority of its advisory board, exceeding by one the number of members who are grant makers.

“What we’ve seen is a tremendous energy and passion at the most local level among people who often didn’t have much connection to the environmental movement before,” says Gale Munson, grants administrator at the Kendall Foundation, in Boston.

Cheryl King Fischer, who directs the fund from her office in Montpelier, Vt., says that the results have met or exceeded the expectations of the original supporters. “Our activists are making real contributions to moving the whole cultural mindset forward,” she observes. In the aggregate, she says, the individual campaigns in New England towns and neighborhoods form pieces of a broader policy mosaic, and tie into efforts being mounted by larger organizations.

“The results have been exciting and encouraging enough that the primary funders are saying, Let’s develop a strategic plan for the next five years,” Ms. Fischer says. The first step — expected later this year — is the fund’s transformation into a freestanding charity.

Beneficiaries of the grants have high praise for the grassroots fund. Mr. Votava, chairman of Friends of the South County Bike Path, in Wakefield, R.I., says it’s difficult for a group that has not registered as a charity to get foundation support. “We’ve been very appreciative of the fact that an organization like NEGEF was flexible enough to work with us and help us achieve some of our goals” with a $2,500 grant, he says. “They were very responsive and non-bureaucratic.”

Mr. Shane, a founder of Concerned Citizens of Brandon, says that his group spent about $30,000 on legal challenges to a Swiss company’s plan to double the number of daily round trips its trucks would make between a marble quarry in Montpelier and its processing plant in Florence, some 23 miles away. The arrival of a $2,500 check from the environment fund to help defray some of that cost, he notes, inspired him and another principal in the group — also a local innkeeper whose business was suffering — to carry on their campaign.

“When NEGEF said, You guys are on the right track, each of us popped our favorite beer and celebrated that night,” Mr. Shane recalls. “We said, We’ll keep fighting. We won’t make any money this year, but we’ll do what we think is right for the town.”

Much as the grant money comes in handy, the environment fund’s annual weekend retreat for all its grantees can be equally important, say Ms. Phelan, director of the Green Cape Alliance for Pesticide Education, in West Barnstable, Mass. Her all-volunteer group, which focuses on reducing the use of pesticides and other toxic chemicals, often feels that it is working in isolation. The retreat last fall was “a great refresher and revitalizer,” Ms. Phelan says. “It was nice to meet other people doing similar things.”

That sense of solidarity can be intoxicating. “For many grassroots organizers and organizations, you can get to feeling pretty lonely and overwhelmed when you’re dealing with blighted communities or confronting large corporations,” says Daniel Ross, executive director of Nuestras Raices, in Holyoke, Mass. “The opportunity to meet ordinary people who are fighting the same fights you’re fighting can be very powerful.”

Nuestras Raices (the name means “our roots”), which was founded in 1992, turns vacant lots in the Puerto Rican neighborhoods of that small industrial city into community gardens, which are tended by more than 90 families. Because the group is now building an agricultural center, which will include a greenhouse, cafe, and community kitchen, its budget this year will approach $350,000 — far above the $100,000 ceiling for NEGEF grantees.

But Mr. Ross, who sits on the grassroots fund’s advisory committee, says he is committed to making more funds available for other small groups — particularly those in inner-city and minority neighborhoods.

“The environmental movement is new in places like Holyoke and inner-city Boston, so it will be a process,” he says.

The fund often is willing to finance activities that other foundations may shy away from. Ginny Callan, for example, has been working for several years to oppose or modify a plan to compost sewage sludge at the wastewater-treatment plant in East Montpelier, Vt. A group of neighbors called Citizens for Clean Compost has persistently challenged the environmental permits for the facility, arguing that it poses health risks to nearby residents.

“We believe in composting, but not with lead, mercury, cadmium, and radioactive materials” that may end up in the sewage sludge being composted, says Ms. Callan, who also sits on NEGEF’s advisory board. When the group needed to raise about $10,000 to hire a lawyer and pay traveling expenses to bring witnesses to testify at state hearings, it received a NEGEF grant toward those expenses. “New England Grassroots was the only funder willing to put money into a court case and legal fees,” she says. “That money meant an awful lot to our group. It was such a positive charge to feel that someone was willing to back us up.”

Grant makers also say they have benefited from their participation in the fund. For one thing, they have extended their aid to groups they could not hope to support through their regular grant making — whether because the groups are so small, or so distant, or engaged in issues that fall outside a foundation’s own interest areas.

“These $2,500 grants are below the radar screen of even a small foundation like this one,” says Ms. Munson of the Kendall Foundation, which has assets of $87-million and whose average grant is about $25,000. “It’s a great vehicle for getting our money down to a much more local level.”

But grant makers who have served on the advisory board also say their collaboration with activists has increased their own understanding of the movement. Says Ruth Hennig, executive director of the John Merck Fund, in Boston: “I have a clearer knowledge of and deeper appreciation for what it means to be a grassroots environmental activist: the kind of barriers they face, the long odds against which they’re working to achieve their goals. I hope I’ve carried that sensitivity into my relations with our grantees.”

NEGEF also is “building the movement from the bottom up,” says Ms. Hennig, “and strengthening citizens who don’t necessarily think of themselves as environmentalists first but as parents, citizens, or people who love the outdoors. Whatever their starting point is, the grassroots fund helps them become more effective as citizen advocates for their local environment, which is critical to the long-term health of the movement.”

Foundations hoping to duplicate that process in other regions should realize that giving small amounts of money to many local groups requires local knowledge of the organizational ecology, say some observers, who add that community foundations are well-placed to incubate similar grassroots funds.

“We’ve got to pay attention to the small, scrappy, volunteer-driven organizations that are doing important work but that find it hard to get access to funding sources,” says Stuart Comstock-Gay, vice president of the New Hampshire Charitable Foundation, which has been NEGEF’s organizational parent for four years. “NEGEF allowed the Charitable Foundation to get at that community without creating a whole big bureaucracy.”

Mr. Comstock-Gay believes that “community foundations are exactly the right vehicle to get these things going,” because they fit so easily within the structure of such foundations, which commonly permit donors to recommend which recipients should benefit from their gifts.

But others are not so sure. “The nature of the groups funded by NEGEF is that they’re advocates, and sometimes strong and vocal ones,” notes Mr. Abernathy. “Community foundations, with some exceptions, are not as comfortable funding advocacy groups as other kinds of funders might be.”

But whatever the eventual structure might be, environmental officials say, funds that make small grants to tiny groups can be of great benefit.

“I was at a meeting with other groups like ours across the country, and they’re very jealous,” says Mr. Wilson of the Toxics Action Center. “Lots of grassroots groups across the country would be dying for a resource like this.”