An online advocacy effort will kick off Wednesday to prod the liberal grass roots into action.

The Center for Community Change will launch Change Nation, a $6.5 million project that marks an expansion toward a coordinated national agenda for the nonprofit, which was established in 1968 to organize poor communities at the local level.

Change Nation will include new Web tools to facilitate its broader mission. It will be housed in the group’s advocacy arm, the Campaign for Community Change, to free activists from some of the restrictions nonprofits face in directly targeting political candidates during elections.

Deepak Bhargava, the center’s executive director, said the project is part of “a relentless commitment to building a volunteer movement from the bottom up.”

“It will build and create new volunteer organizing tools which allow people to bring their passions, hopes, anger and ideas directly to the institutions and people who stand in the way of an America in which everyone has enough to thrive,” he wrote in a blog post on the new site, joinchangenation.org.

For its first initiative, Change Nation organizers said they are teaming up with MoveOn.org to hold thousands of house meetings nationwide on the economy. From those July gatherings, the group expects to formulate a policy agenda for the 2012 election cycle.