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There is growing interest in the roles of the sharing economy and grassroots innovation in the transition to sustainable societies. Grassroots innovation research has tended to assume a sharp distinction between grassroots organisations and businesses within niches of socio-technical innovation. However, the non-profit sector literature identifies a tendency for non-profit organisations to actually become more commercially-oriented over time. Seeking to account for this tendency, we develop a conceptual model of the dynamics of grassroots organisations within socio-technical niches. Using a case study of Freegle, a grassroots organisation within the sharing economy niche, we apply the conceptual model to illustrate the causes, processes and outcomes of grassroots niche organisations becoming more commercially-oriented. We show that a grassroots organisation may be subject to coercive and indirect …