MEASURING THE GRASSROOTS: Puzzles of Cultivating the Grassroots from the Top Down

Does a participatory, open-ended organizational format inspire creativity and draw on participants' local knowledge? Many nonprofits operate under this assumption, and many of their financial sponsors agree, and therefore demand precise accounts documenting the nonprofits' “participatory” formats. In the U.S. youth civic engagement projects described here, the practice of accounting itself had an effect, regardless of funders' goals. Volunteers devoted more time to documenting just how participatory, open-ended and grassroots they were than they devoted to any other topic. Organizers strenuously tried to avert attention from accounting's importance, but could not avoid it. Volunteers could not reflect on the accounting process, or on the political questions behind it; knowledge of it became a repressed institutional intuition.