About Us

Our Mission

We give organizations the power to engage people in solving today's biggest social and environmental challenges.

Our vision

An engaged public with a strong voice working on creating thriving communities and a healthy planet our kids' kids can inherit. We believe technology gives organizations the power to engage and mobilize people to bring about social change on an unprecedented scale.

Meet our Board

Steve Muran, Board President
Sherry Richardson, Immediate Past President
Complete listing of Groundwire board.

Our History

Groundwire (formerly ONE/Northwest) was founded in 1995 by two of the region’s leading environmental foundations, The Bullitt Foundation and The Brainerd Foundation. We were launched with a vision of helping Pacific Northwest environmental groups use the Internet to build stronger ties to the public and to each other. Since our founding we have helped over 1,000 environmental organizations.

Groundwire

Today, social change organizations need to know the difference between someone who casually reads about them on Facebook and someone who donates, volunteers, and raves about them on their blog. That’s why we created the Groundwire Engagement Pyramid framework and Groundwire Engagement Platform technology. They give organizations the knowledge and power to engage and mobilize people in new ways to achieve greater impact. Our thought-leadership around engagement and our technology tools created in Groundwire Labs are transforming the social change world.

Groundwire also provides engagement strategy and technology consulting to the grantees of foundations that award us grants for that purpose. And we invest in strategic partnerships and engagement initiatives that we believe will help us achieve our mission.

Groundwire Consulting

In 2011, we decided the very best way for us to achieve our mission of an engaged public with a strong voice and powerful influence over decisions that affect their communities and the health of the planet was to create a new social enterprise model. We formed a hybrid that includes Groundwire the parent nonprofit and Groundwire Consulting, the for-profit arm that allows us to serve mission-aligned clients from nonprofit, business, and government sectors. Groundwire Consulting is a B Corporation and joins a new sector of the economy which uses the power of business to solve social and environmental problems.

This is an exciting social enterprise business model and we’re proud to be contributing knowledge, skills, and experience to other organizations looking to implement this model in their future. We think this is the future of social change in our country and a quicker path to a healthy planet.