ABSTRACT
Tearfund, a Christian relief and development organisation, aims to mobilise local churches in its holistic response to global poverty. Grounded in the wider literature on social movements with grassroots orientation, this chapter engages in differential positioning of Tearfund’s approaches to social mobilisation and social movement building. It identifies the ways in which Tearfund’s work can be considered a social movement. Within this overarching question, two sub-questions are addressed. How does the organisation approach social mobilisation and social movement building and how are mobilisation objectives decided and played out in the UK and internationally? Whilst the first question grapples with Tearfund’s self-description terms, the second question assesses how “grassroots” the approach is. The analysis is based on a review of internal secondary sources and primary stakeholder interviews at Tearfund UK and Tearfund Rwanda.
