Grassroots INGOs as a channel for diaspora philanthropy

ABSTRACT

The development literature had for some time ignored the differences among international nongovernmental organisations (INGOs). However, recent research has looked at grassroots INGOs in particular, understanding them as alternative development actors. Grassroots INGOs are personally driven development NGOs, often funded through private donations, run by volunteers, and have modest budgets. This paper analyses diaspora-founded grassroots INGOs and asks the following questions: What does the organisational subfield of diaspora-founded grassroots INGOs look like? What types of services do diaspora-founded grassroots INGOs provide? What motivates their creation? The article contributes to research that further considers the diversity of the organisational field of INGOs, uses an empirical approach beyond case studies through the creation and analysis of a unique dataset, and deepens our understanding of diaspora members in particular as development actors.

KEYWORDS:

• Diaspora philanthropy
• diaspora giving
• motivations to giving
• founding stories

Sustainable Development Goals KEYWORDS:

• SDG 1: No poverty

Acknowledgements

I would like to acknowledge Allison Schnable’s seminal work on grassroots INGOs; together, we created and collaborated on the Grassroots Aid Survey (https://grassrootsaid.faculty.indiana.edu/index.html), which provided initial seed money from the Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy and its data were used for this article. I also want to acknowledge and express my gratitude to the terrific work of graduate students Rachel Morris, Arzana Myderrizi, and Battulga Buyannemekh, for their research time and help at various stages with the construction the database. My former student and now colleague, Ximeng Chen, also was involved in earlier stages of this research and I am grateful to her.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 “Org” is used to cite the various organisations included in the dataset, which are coded by number.

2 See also the 2019 special issue of Third World Quarterly (No. 40, Issue 10) called “Citizen aid: grassroots interventions in development and humanitarianism”.

3 Data were compiled from the US Internal Revenue Service Business Master Files; for more details about the sample, please see https://grassrootsaid.faculty.indiana.edu/

4 The organisation without a website had a Facebook page where we able to obtain information.

5 Lost Boys of South Sudan were unaccompanied Sudanese refugee minors who, starting in the 2000s, were resettled in the US, Canada, and Australia due to the civil war in what now is Sudan and South Sudan (see Geltman et al. 2005).