Perpetual Effervescence? The Life Trajectories of American Grassroots International NGOs

What is the staying power of citizen aid groups as individual organisations and as an organisational population in aid provision? How many grow, die, or persist? This chapter combines administrative data from US-based grassroots international NGOs (a type of citizen aid group) with case studies to answer these questions. Administrative data allow us to quantitatively examine the lifespan of roughly 11,000 organisations between 1995 and 2010 and to determine how their revenues rise, fall, or stagnate over time. We find that while the overall population has grown, half of individual organisations become inactive within 15 years. Case studies demonstrate that the founders of grassroots international NGOs are crucial actors in not only the birth of organisations but in determining their long-term trajectories: through persistence, growth, or ‘death’.