Build counter-power with the most affected groups
This objective reflects our commitment to resource and support those most directly affected by civic space restrictions, including environmental defenders, frontline activists and journalists, Indigenous peoples, LGBTQI+ people, women and young people. These are the voices we prioritise in our research, ensuring they shape our knowledge products rather than appearing in them as subjects.
Movement building
The Freedom of Peaceful Assembly workstream supports grassroots and frontline movements through two initiatives. WeRise builds a global network of movement leaders. This year we will strengthen the Alumni Network with a structured operational plan, a harvesting and reflection meeting, digital safety and resilience training, a MENA Look and Learn regional solidarity exchange and eight small grants to regional partners.
The Protest Lab drives distributed civic innovation through prototype development, learning dialogues on protest dynamics, including artivism and alternative forms of collective action, and regional and global exchanges, and will culminate in a Global Protest Trends Dialogue linked to CIVICUS Monitor findings. We will publish a thematic report on underage protesters and child protection mechanisms, an original contribution to an under-explored area of protest rights.
The VUKA Coalition is transitioning from a globally coordinated network to a regionally grounded ecosystem, establishing five regional civic action platforms in Africa, the Americas, Asia and Pacific, Eastern Europe and MENA, and engaging 75 to 90 regional and thematic organisations. Adaptive action teams will focus on strategic litigation and thematic coordination. Together with allies, we will develop and deploy shared tools, consisting of a Global Solidarity Playbook, a Litigation Case Tracker and Amicus Repository, a Narratives Mapping Tool and a second edition of the Protest Handbook. We are also developing a diversified funding strategy to ensure VUKA is not dependent on any single host or funder.
Protection and solidarity
The Global Resource Hub will connect WeRise alumni and Protest Lab innovators to protection mechanisms through quarterly Protection Pathways meetings, a hybrid Activist Symposium with allied movements and sub-grants to partners for follow-up activities. Through the Movement Visibility Series, we will spotlight movement wins that rarely reach international audiences.
Through the Bridging the Gaps programme and the Flexible Support Mechanism, we will disburse targeted sub-grants to environmental defenders, LGBTQI+ organisations, women human rights defenders and youth groups, ensuring at least one grant per thematic area to organisations working at the intersection of exclusion and risk.
Capacity strengthening
We will launch a new cohort-based learning experience for members and provide ongoing training sessions drawing on our expertise. Capacity-strengthening components run through other programmes, including CHARM’s advocacy bootcamps for civil society in Sub-Saharan Africa, the Digital Democracy Initiative’s Digital Action Lab and Tech Accompaniment Programme, the EU SEE project’s methodology training for network members, WeRise’s digital safety and resilience training for movement leaders and our support for members engaging with the Human Rights Council and UPR processes.
Networks and membership
We will relaunch and activate the Youth Network through a new youth engagement plan, hold a Youth Action Team meeting and secure fundraising for the network’s long-term sustainability. We will strengthen the Affinity Group of National Associations (AGNA) as a global accountability network of national umbrella organisations from over 70 countries, including by supporting engagement at the High-Level Political Forum and Voluntary National Review processes of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), hosting the AGNA Annual General Meeting and developing an updated donor map and resourcing plan.
We will continue to embed accountability to members across the organisation, strengthening systems to track network activity and integrating impact tracking into all member engagements. Members will receive exclusive previews of all major research outputs before public launch.
What we are doing differently:
- We are adapting how we work to meet movements where they are rather than expecting them to engage on our terms. A new generation is reshaping how collective action happens and established civil society cannot afford to be left behind.
- As the backlash is hitting the most excluded first and hardest, we are responding by building solidarity with those groups into how we allocate resources and design our programmes, rather than treating it as an add-on.
- We are investing in the longer-term health and connectivity of the movements we work with, helping build the infrastructure, relationships and protection mechanisms that allow them to sustain resistance beyond any single crisis or funding cycle.