ELCI will play a vital role by supporting community-based programs dedicated to developing grassroots leadership. Disadvantaged, disenfranchised underrepresented and overlooked constituencies that need grassroots leadership the most generally lack access to appropriate programs to develop their leaders’ skills or encourage their growth and success. This makes sense—most leadership programs are aimed at established constituencies making a contribution to mainstream institutions—academics, business leaders, public officials, nonprofit executives. Specifically targeted and appropriate leadership programs, offered by training intermediaries or other support organizations, are crucial to developing grassroots leadership.

How will people in our communities gain voice and the capacity to get things done? Where will they find the toeholds that lead to greater civic participation and political power? What strategies will work when voting rates drop precipitously as one moves down the economic ladder? Grassroots leadership offers an answer, a tool for connecting people into a base and empowering them to act on behalf of themselves and others. Grassroots leadership is a key—to community cohesion and mobilization, to community economic development, to political protection and representation. Grassroots leadership can restore, expand, and reorganize the coalitions that have long guarded the political space in which jobs programs, health care, public education, and civil rights survive. And, it can build new ones—it is necessary to build new ones. New problems and new constituencies need new leadership— and such leadership cannot be sent down or assigned to them; it must come from the grassroots themselves.