We provide free support to grassroots organisations
What is Nurturing Grassroots?
Nurturing Grassroots (previously called Steps to Sustainability) is our hands-on organisational development programme for grassroots organisations and CICs. We offer tailored, practical support using a co-productive, “learning by doing” approach.
We provide:
Free 1-to-1 consultancy support, co-producing up to three tangible outputs based on each organisation’s most pressing challenges, creating a real ‘step change’. Outputs might include an impact report, a new website, or strengthened organisational policies.
Action-focused workshops that help organisations apply key sector trends in real time, covering topics like AI, marketing strategy, and building/sustaining lived experience leadership.
Leadership and wellbeing coaching, up to 24 individuals can receive six 1-hour 1-to-1 coaching sessions, group wellbeing and learning sessions, and masterclasses that address the most pressing challenges faced by leaders in the sector. The programme also includes in-person/ online for peer connection and networking.
Our current programme
Participants move through the programme as part of a cohort, forming supportive relationships through regular group sessions, and tapping into a broader ecosystem through our regular coffee clubs with sector professionals.
Organisations will progress through the programme in cohorts of up to 30, enabling them to build meaningful peer relationships and leave the programme with both stronger support networks and enhanced connections to sector-wide professionals.
In April 2025, we re-launched our latest iteration of the programme under the refreshed name: Nurturing Grassroots.
Why Nurture Grassroots?
Grassroots organisations in communities facing poverty, discrimination and disadvantage are immensely valuable to society. By ‘grassroots’ organisations, we mean non-profits that are led by the people and community they’re seeking to support, usually locally. They are: agile, deeply motivated, trusted by their communities and extremely knowledgeable of their needs.
Despite their immense value, many grassroots organisations achieve what they achieve against the odds. With the right support, their potential for impact is even greater. Yet, the landscape remains particularly difficult for those led by and for communities facing poverty, discrimination and disadvantage:
People and processes are biased towards larger, more established organisations. Institutions in the sector that control the resources often lack diversity and therefore understanding of the context of life in communities facing poverty, discrimination and disadvantage - so their processes are not accessible.
In organisations led by communities facing poverty, discrimination and disadvantage, leaders and staff are themselves experiencing structural disadvantages, so they have less capacity and less access to resources.
That's why we developed what is now known as Nurturing Grassroots– previously delivered under the names Steps to Sustainability; Steps to Recovery; Kinder Communities: Steps to Sustainability to support, catalyse and energise grassroots organisations, so that they can survive and thrive, leveraging positive social impact in the communities that they know and love.
Steps to Sustainability was developed during the pandemic. Since coming ‘out of the frying pan and into the fire’, the support is needed more than ever so these organisations continue to support communities most in need with often complex intersecting challenges including, racism and structural discrimination, poverty and economic inequality, education inequities, digital exclusion, health inequities, hostile environment policies, funding injustice, climate crisis and environmental injustice, AI and technological bias and more.
Frequently Asked Questions
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To survive and thrive, grassroots organisations need capacity, resources, organisational sustainability, skills and confidence.
There are a few things that set Nurturing Grassroots apart from other capacity building programmes:
Learning by doing, rather than training-oriented: we feel it’s a misconception that grassroots organisations lack skills per se. Rather, they need support to develop ‘mental blueprints’ and confidence for certain processes. Therefore, it makes more sense to work with the organisation to co-produce the output, rather than tell them how to do it and send them off to do it on their own!
Hands-on support: we directly provide additional capacity overstretched grassroots organisations lack, which makes organisations feel valued and means they come away from the programme with tangible results.
Led by the organisation: each organisation develops according to its strengths and its own ‘organisational personality’ - and not to fit some particular mould set by funders.
Relational coaching: we give organisations the time and attention they need to effectively coach them, and help them forge meaningful connections with each other too, Organisations feel valued and energised.
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We work with organisations to identify their priorities, and establish up to three outputs we’re going to co-produce together. We keep talking about co-producing tangible outputs! What do we mean? Typical outputs include:
Community engagement exercises
Funding applications
Fundraising strategies
Impact reports
Organisational strengths reviews and strategy development
Communications strategies
Communications materials and website redesigns
Upgrading systems and processes
Housekeeping: constitutional documents and policies for passing funders’ due diligence checks
Partnership development
Click here to see some highlights of our past work. -
We all remember the start of the pandemic. Within weeks, Covid-19 brought the UK’s long-standing inequalities into plain sight, and, over the course of the two years, widened them further. We started the first iteration of S2S to reduce the inequity within the charity sector. We saw that not only were marginalised communities disproportionately affected by the pandemic, organisations led by and for them were least well-equipped to survive and thrive during the pandemic. We wanted to intercept this self-perpetuating cycle of widening inequalities.
S2S started small but snowballed due to the need for it: we have been running different iterations of the programme since 2020. The UK Government saw the potential of grassroots organisations at this point too, and leveraged them through the ‘Community Champions’ programme. Community Champions was a strength-based approach to tackling vaccine hesitancy. Given many disadvantaged communities’ low trust in public services, the government called on civil society organisations to deliver public health messaging to communities they were embedded in. To work, the Government recognised that Community Champions needed to be supported as well as leveraged. The CSC team was called in to deliver S2S and provide that support.
To reduce health inequalities - and the social determinants of those health inequalities - we need to support, catalyse and empower grassroots organisations.
Programme structure
Onboarding: organisations complete a baseline survey in advance of their first consultation to prepare advisors for the session.
1-to-1 advice sessions and discussions to identify up to three priorities and a three-point plan. At this stage, the group will be allocated an advisor from the CSC team, who will be their main/first point of contact throughout.
Hands-on follow-up support: organisations work with the CSC team to co-produce up to three tangible outputs (e.g. website redesign, a communications strategy, or an impact report).
Group workshops, through which organisations connect with other members of their cohort, as well as funders and experts, and receive interactive training on: Communications, Loneliness theory, Governance, Income Generation, Theory of Change.
Leadership and Wellbeing sessions, organisations work with CSC’s Specialist Coaching Associate and up to 24 individuals can receive six 1-hour 1-to-1 coaching sessions. All organisations can attend group wellbeing and learning sessions, masterclasses and gatherings.
Toolkits and Guides: The CSC team gathers the most pressing issues that organisations they are working with are facing and for recurring themes, we produce a Toolkit or Guide that is shared with all the groups to access with helpful hints and tips to support them.
Staying in touch: organisations stay in touch via regular online coffee club meetings with expert sector wide professionals.. A number of organisations have gone on to secure funding to scale their initiatives, and commissioned us to evaluate!
The end-to-end journey of Nurturing Grassroots for each organisation looks like this:
Our impact to date
So far we’ve worked 1-to-1 with 200 grassroots organisations led by and for marginalised and disadvantaged communities. By developing them holistically, we helped them secure more than £2 million of funding. We’ve reached an additional 603 organisations through our free capacity building webinars, coffee clubs, gatherings and leadership development sessions.
Since completing our programme:
92% of organisations are more confident about their ability to flourish and continue to support their community in the future;
96% won funding from charitable trusts;
87% enhanced their systems and delivery;
100% reached and supported more organisations who need them.
How can you benefit from Nurturing Grassroots?
The CSC team are proud of what organisations supported through former Nurturing Grassroots programmes have achieved. We have created a fantastic network of change-makers and are continuing to create more - and we have perfected our delivery model. We invite you to leverage the programme in your work.
How you can leverage Nurturing Grassroots will depend on who you are.
Are you …
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Substantial and robust capacity-building is a top priority for funders looking to be more equitable and inclusive. Capacity-building is crucial for a good balance of power in the long run.
Nurturing Grassroots is a unique capacity-building programme, which funders can implement flexibly, easily and affordably. Skip to 2 ‘Why this approach’ to find out why Nurturing Grassroots is a fantastic way to capacity-build your grantees. If you’re interested in using Nurturing Grassroots as a way of delivering ‘funders plus’ or ‘grants plus’, contact one of our directors to hear the pitch.
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We understand how tricky executing CSR can be. With limited budgets, you may be restricted to funding individual projects, which can feel like a drop in the ocean. There may be conflicting views in your team about how much the spending benefits your company and you may have limited capacity for managing the budget too. Supporting grassroots charities led 'by and for' communities facing poverty, discrimination and disadvantage in your local areas is an effective way to overcome some of these challenges to get the most out of your CSR/ESG budget.
The benefits of this approach are that (unlike funding individual projects) you’re actually investing in the communities around you. Therefore, you can be confident it will have a multiplier effect for communities and your company in the short, medium- and long-term. It’s also a way to build your own network of ‘community champions’, which have unparalleled access to the communities you find “hard to reach”, which can be of value to your company. It is high-impact, but also cost-effective too.
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If you ARE a grassroots organisation, the best way to be involved is to get yourselves on one of our cohorts.
Complete our baseline survey and co-production and values statement and we will contact you to set up your initial consultation
Some of our key delivery partners:
