Welcome to our November 2025 newsletter!
The implosion of the world’s first known democracy in Athens has been traced to economic collapse and a crisis of legitimacy, among other things. Yet the ancient Greeks’ vision for a better society, and the principles underpinning Athenian democracy, have endured.
The historical resonance of this was not lost on us as we gathered in Athens last week for our annual Steering Committee meeting. Thanks to a ‘Democracy Futures’ foresight exercise facilitated by the Mercator Switzerland and Robert Bosch Foundation, we explored the trends that will shape European democracy in the coming decades, and how we can defend it.
It is essential, we concluded, to keep evolving how we practice philanthropy to match the urgency and complexity of the moment.
Deepening our mission
This month’s feature article introduces our new grantee partners. Over the course of this year we supported 47 new grantees, all of whom demonstrate agility and innovation in tackling emerging threats to democracy.
As well as showing our evolving ability to respond to shifting challenges in volatile times, our new partners also demonstrate a deepening of our core mission: to protect and expand civic space, strengthen independent public interest media, and tackle technology’s impact on democracy. Their work inspires us and we are excited to work with them.
Our aim is to be a catalyst for increased public and private funding for democracy in Europe. With discussions on the next long-term EU budget currently unfolding, we are finalising our support to five organisations who advocate for strengthening Europe’s civic infrastructure, and are focused on safeguarding funding for the AGORA-EU programme – which is crucial for a vibrant civil society in Europe.
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In solidarity,
ELISA PETER
Director, Civitates
Stepping up in testing times. We are excited to welcome our new Civitates grantees. Each of them is doing incredibly important work to strengthen democracy and civic space across Europe at a time when the backlash against them is rising.
Together, they represent both a deepening of our core mission – protecting and expanding civic space, strengthening independent public interest media, and addressing the impact of technology on democratic values and discourse – and our evolving ability to respond to urgent, evolving threats, from the rollback of civic freedoms to funding gaps for public interest journalism. Meet our new grantee partners here.
Asociația ACCEPT and the Euroregional Center for Public Initiatives (ECPI) responded resolutely to local authorities’ attempt to ban the first Pride march in the city of Oradea, Romania. They coordinated a public statement by almost 50 NGOs; mobilised diplomatic, institutional and political support, including from 14 Embassies; and held a press conference, among other things. Despite no formal authorisation, the march went ahead. At the end of October, ACCEPT submitted a strategic litigation case against the Romanian state to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR, for violating the right to peaceful assembly.
EU Disinfo Lab’s new publication, Documenting the setbacks: The new environment for counter-disinformation in Europe and Germany, shows how hostile foreign actors and shifting domestic politics are reshaping Europe’s information space, illustrated through the case of Germany.
AI Forensics analysis has revealed that TikTok’s algorithm amplified polarising videos glorifying war and weapons during the NATO meetings in June.
AI Forensics, along with Fundación Maldita.es, has also recently exposed TikTok’s and YouTube’s failures to address climate mis- and disinformation in content on their platforms about Valencia’s devastating floods in 2024. The study is here.
FADA Collective‘s Giacomo Zandonini has documented the European police agency Europol’s opaque links with the tech industry for Statewatch. With Apostolis Fotiadis and Ludek Stavinoha, he exposed Europol’s secretive AI programme, used for its vast and growing dataset. The story was covered by Computer Weekly, Solomon and Netzpolitik.
A joint investigation by Hope and Courage Collective (H&CC) and the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) documented and analysed 172 instances of political mis- and disinformation published on X, TikTok, Facebook and YouTube in the six weeks leading up to polling day in the Irish presidential election on 24 October 2025.
The Clean Elections Workshops run across Hungary by the the ACT coalition have attracted full houses, as the country prepares for its crucial 2026 parliamentary election. The enormous interest in these workshops, in which 29 organisations joined forces for 24 events, reflects the widespread desire to ensure the election’s integrity.
To mark its 10th anniversary, the independent Romanian media outlet PressOne – supported by national influences and leading civil society figures – launched a campaign to attract more subscribers. It will reach at least 1,000,000 people and underline how PressOne’s investigations and reports influenced Romania’s society in the last decade.
This month, the Media Forward Fund (MFF) has begun strengthening public interest media across the DACH region (Germany, Switzerland and Austria) with a new upskilling programme, particularly focusing on science and data journalism. The programme is being supported by Germany’s Federal Ministry of Research, Technology, and Space (BMFTR). The MFF was co-founded in 2024 by the Schöpflin Foundation.
#aufstehn, the Austrian civil society campaign organisation, has launched its new and improved petition platform, which includes practical guidance and a video tutorial. This month #aufstehn celebrated its 10th anniversary, marking a decade of achievement in promoting civic engagement and collective action to initiate change.
On the third anniversary of the Digital Service Act’s (DSA) entry into force, Fundación Maldita.es promoted an open letter signed by 20 CSOs (including Civitates fellow grantees FELGTBI+ and FEMBLOC) and 40 researchers demanding that Spain’s Parliament passes the necessary changes to empower the Spanish designated Digital Service Coordinator.
The European Cultural Foundation and the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) have launched their European Sentiment Compass 2025. Reality Show: Why Europe must not cave in to Trump’s culture war finds that Europe is in a culture war with President Trump’s America, which is propping up ideological allies in Europe – yet insists that it doesn’t have to be this way.
LEFÖ, the Austrian migrant women organisation, has been celebrating its 40th anniversary and the many milestones achieved in that time. As well as bringing together “everyone who has been part of our sometimes turbulent, sometimes exciting, but always meaningful and beautiful history”, LEFÖ participated in the Zusammen, Halt Careers Fair introducing a new generation of law students to LEFÖ, and its important work.
This month, the Children’s Office at the University of Vienna (Kinderbüro Universität Wien gGmbH) held its first DOCK dialogue with two school classes and more than 30 experts from different fields of expertise, marking the end of the first Stepping Stones project cycle. The project actively involves young people in democratic participation processes and offers them the opportunity to raise issues and concerns important to them. Read more here.
Steering Committee meets in Athens
Civitates’ final 2025 Steering Committee was graciously hosted by the Bodossaki Foundation. Thirty-three foundations participated in person or online. Key takeaways included that democratic systems will only thrive if people feel that their votes and voices matter; the need for Civitates to keep adapting our grant-making to respond to the worsening context; and for us to rethink how we evaluate our partners’ work, and support them, as this context shifts.
Civitates is growing
After sifting through around 400 applications and doing two rounds of interviews, we’ve recruited a new Impact and Learning Manager, Maria Guerra-Arias. Maria is the former Director of Impact, Data and Evidence at Planned Parenthood Global, and will bring a decade’s worth of monitoring evaluation and learning (MEL) experience when she starts in January, and help us achieve our goal of becoming a learning hub for philanthropy and civil society.
02/12/25 – Women & Money – Trends and challenges in the next MFF
Location: Room SPAAK 7C50, European Parliament, Brussels, 10am – 12 noon.
The Bulgarian Fund for Women (BFW) and the European Women’s Lobby (EWL) are organising this invite high-level discussion on the MFF in the context of the backlash against women’s rights, hosted by Ilhan Kyuchyuk, MEP. Register here.
Jobs & opportunities:
- EU DisinfoLab is looking for Communications and community interns to join their Brussels team in 2026. If you’re interested in gaining hands-on experience in strategic communications, community building, and content creation. More details are here.
- The Obama Foundation has now opened applications for the 2026-2027 Leaders cohorts. The foundation are looking for resilient and hopeful leaders from across Europe aged 24-45, who demonstrate a values-based, collaborative approach to leadership and are eager to learn from their peers. Find out more on how to apply here. Deadline for applications is December 12th.
We Recommend:
- Fragile Media Freedom Progress in Bulgaria at Risk – 2025 Report documents the challenges facing Bulgarian media. The report was prepared by the partner organisations of the Council of Europe’s Safety of Journalists Platform and the Media Freedom Rapid Response (MFRR).
- EU DisInfoLab have published updated factsheets for Poland and Romania as part of their series, The Disinformation Landscape Across Europe. These are particularly relevant in the context of Poland’s 2027 parliamentary election, and Romania’s cancelled presidential election last year.
- AI Forensics’ released two technical reports highlighting concerns over the age verification systems and regulatory compliance by two porn websites in the French context, AgeGo and AgeVerif. The reports can be here and here.
- FADA Collective’s Marco Simoncelli and Davide Lemmi, and Tanzanian journalist Khalifa Said Rashid, published the first parts of a long investigation into the damage that will arise from the Tanzanian government’s plan to build a vast nature conservation zone in the north of the country, with the support of powerful global tourism actors and others. Articles can be found here, here, here, and here.
- A Culture Compass for Europe – How Culture Can Lead the Way is the European Cultural Foundation’s reaction to European Commissioner Micallef’s Culture Compass, which aims to put culture back at the heart of Europe’s political vision. Commissioner Micallef was interviewed in the Cultural Foundations annual magazine, here.
- Architects of Online Influence: How Creators, Platforms, and Policymakers Shape Political Speech. This report by the Center for Democracy and Technology explores the growing role of political influencers in our democracy and how they fit — or fail to fit — within existing conceptual, legal, and policy models.
