The Grassroots Institute aims to undertake education, capacity building, innovative research, strengthen human development initiatives and take appropriate grassroots field action to empower marginalized communities, Indigenous peoples, ethnic groups, and threatened and vulnerable peoples.
Started in 2005 as training and research institution in India, the Grassroots Institute has emerged as independent action research, academic and capacity building organization. In the year 2018, the Grassroots Institute was registered as Non-Profit Corporation in Canada. The Grassroots Institute is governed by the Directors and authenticated by International Advisory Council of various discipline.
The Grassroots Institute envisions effecting positive change through participation in a world in which local communities and First Nations who have been marginalized by environmental degradation, poverty, conflict and other forms of injustice gain control over their natural and biocultural resources, lives and livelihoods, and the policy decisions that affect their lives directly or indirectly.
The underlying thinking behind The Grassroots Institute is to bridge the gaps between theoretical and discourse based knowledge developed in academic institutions and the actual field milieu using or requiring that body of knowledge. Generally observed, there is mostly a unidirectional flow of knowledge from universities or research institutions to the rural/urban communities who are treated recipient ends of development interventions. The Grassroots Institute envisages to bank for research, trainings, documentation, publication, participatory initiatives and discourses upon local and Indigenous knowledge systems and communities’ primary experiences and experiments. The documentation, publication, trainings and academic discourses can better help mainstream the grassroots knowledge sets, local innovations, local needs and local technologies in the contemporary research, teaching and extension agenda of academic institutions/platforms. Obviously, the academic institutions and research organizations need to be supported and oriented to the real and grassroots issues, strengths, dynamism and needs of the common people especially Indigenous communities. In order to realize this paradigm construct, all teachers and researchers in academic institutions should contribute to field implementation projects, and all field staff of practice-based organizations should teach or assist the students. This way, all teachers will become field practitioners too. They would have a combine of the theoretical knowledge and practical insights at a time. The philosophy of the “grassroots” validates the same interface of ground reality with the rhetoric or theory (The Grassroots Institute promotes this philosophy). With the above background and objectives, the Grassroots Institute has started publishing the journals to provide opportunities to budding researchers, young academics, scholars, teachers and field practitioners not only to document and research relevant aspects and changes at the grassroots level but also communicate the results of their findings. Their findings should reach the public domain and mainstream/elite academics. Intention of our journals is also to stimulate debates, discourses and new thinking among research communities, academics, field practitioners and policy makers for people-centric right orientation and progress.
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