CASE STUDY
Grassroots Policy Incubator
LOCATION
New York, NY
ACTIVE
2024-present
Tapping into the power of small, community-based organizations, the Grassroots Policy Incubator provides funding, partnership and coaching, capacity-building, and other resources to grassroots groups that are identifying and developing innovative solutions to pressing policy challenges facing New York City.
Challenge:
Grassroots organizations are led by members of the community they serve and intentionally engage the community in their goals, approaches, or recommendations for addressing challenges. With their close ties, trust, and firsthand knowledge of their communities, grassroots organizations are well-positioned to offer effective solutions to these challenges and create meaningful change. In a city as diverse as New York, community organizations, and particularly grassroots ones, are essential for their expertise in identifying challenges across communities, and have unique insights on the most effective strategies to address them.
Despite their unique expertise, many grassroots organizations encounter barriers that make it difficult to fully make the policy change impact they are hoping for. This is largely due to complex funding requirements in many funding solicitations that grassroots organizations are often unable to meet and, relatedly, their challenges in building out capacity and programming amidst competing demands and limited resources. Many funding sources, both public and private, require time, fundraising expertise, and internal systems that smaller nonprofits often lack. By providing flexible funding to develop both programming and infrastructure, funders can unleash their potential to address social challenges through impactful, community-driven solutions.
Approach:
Within this context, CUNY ISLG, in collaboration with New York City Mayor’s Office for Economic Opportunity (NYCO), launched a pilot funding opportunity in late 2024. The Grassroots Policy Incubator (GPI) was designed to build up community leaders and organizations who were developing innovative solutions to pressing policy challenges facing New York City communities. The GPI sought to create a model that harnesses the expertise of these leaders and provides partnerships and other resources to support them.
The GPI framework defines incubation as a process for identifying, developing, and testing a solution to a community programmatic or policy challenge. This is done by identifying the issue, analyzing why the challenge exists, developing a response to address it, implementing the proposed solution, and evaluating the implementation’s success.
In fall 2024, we opened a proposal solicitation for grassroots leaders, offering up to $40,000 to participate in a six-month incubation process to develop an approach or recommendation that addresses a policy gap or challenge in an NYC community. We aimed to support organizations that had an identified issue and were looking to implement a solution, as well as to provide them with individualized capacity-building support to address broader infrastructure needs and to connect them with a network of supportive stakeholders.
A review committee selected three organizations to participate in the pilot GPI. Only small organizations were eligible, and many qualified organizations applied, confirming the need for this type of investment.
Progress:
CUNY ISLG officially launched the GPI in April 2025, bringing these three grassroots organizations together in person for the first time. Over seven months, CUNY ISLG staff and the GPI grantees met one-on-one and as a learning community to analyze their policy gaps and discuss approaches to addressing them. The grantees also participated in community conversations and met with experts in relevant policy fields. Additionally, the grantees engaged in group and individual Training and Technical Assistance (TTA) through CUNY ISLG or an external partner to address their broader organizational needs, such as data analysis, communications, and fundraising.
Learn more about the selected organizations below; read our blog for more on their accomplishments.
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The Flossy Organization is based in Canarsie and helps build civic engagement and advocacy skills among neighborhood residents. Through intergenerational civics training, grassroots mobilization, and building awareness and mobilization around social justice, the Flossy Organization has activated 600 volunteers and helped secure $1.6 million in funding for community-based anti-violence programming in Canarsie.
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Immigrant Children Advocates’ Relief Effort (ICARE) is a coalition of legal advocates dedicated to expanding access to legal representation for immigrant children facing deportation in New York City, while advocating for universal access to counsel. Since 2014, ICARE has obtained relief (including preventing deportation and helping obtain additional humanitarian supports) for over 1,500 children in immigration court, and their work is more essential than ever today as migrants face unrelenting hostility and cruelty from the federal government.
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The Survivors Justice Project (SJP) is a collective of activists, lawyers, social workers, students, and researchers fighting for decarceration through the New York Domestic Violence Survivors Justice Act (DVSJA). The DVSJA, a 2019 New York State law, recognizes that criminalization disproportionately affects survivors of domestic violence and allows judges to sentence survivors convicted of criminal offenses to shorter prison terms and, in some cases, community-based alternative-to-incarceration programs. The law also allows survivors currently in prison the opportunity to apply for resentencing. SJP works to identify survivors eligible for sentencing relief under DVSJA, works with legal system stakeholders to support SJP implementation, and gathers information and data about DVSJA for advocates working to pass similar policies outside New York.
The GPI concluded with a final event where each organization shared their progress towards addressing their respective community or policy challenge. As a pilot initiative, the lessons learned from the GPI are a unique and insightful resource for developing holistic, impactful funding for grassroots policy development with high return-on-investment (ROI) in the future.
Contact Senior Policy Associate Evan Goldstein or Policy Program Director Patrick Hart for more information.
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