The Peace Institute organised a workshop on strategic and crisis communication for civil society organisations in Slovenia. The workshop, which was facilitated by a representative of the Slovak coalition, built on the experience of Slovak organisations, which had more experience in this field. Participants looked at concrete strategies, tactics and tools and tried to apply these to the Slovenian context. After the workshop, several new ideas were adopted and implemented by the participating organisations.

The Czech coalition organised a workshop on ‘Collective Impact 3.0’, a methodology for civil society networks to fuel their efforts to tackle collectively the complex problems of the fragmented societies, and to build desired and lasting social change towards resilient civil society sector.  The workshop was facilitated by Mark Cabaj from Tamarack Institute, a renowned expert in this field. Participants discussed how to go from management to movement building, from shared measurement to strategic learning, and from backbone structures to stimulating “containers of change”. The workshop was attended by a large number Czech civil society organisations, as well as a handful of Civitates grantees from other countries.

The European Partnership for Democracy organised a workshop on digital security for its secretariat and member organisations. The workshop focused specifically on data privacy, internet security and implications for workflows in the respective organisations. It helped increase the awareness on digital security among participants, and resulted in an action plan to increase the organization’s digital security. The workshop was also attended by a Civitates grantee from the Czech Republic that was keen to improve their capacity in this area. The improved digital security became even more important during the Covid-19 lockdown, when everyone had to work remotely.

Two coalitions in Hungary decided to carry out a joint learning initiative. The initiative capitalises on the strengths of both coalitions to strengthen civil society in Hungary, especially outside of Budapest. It also aims to enhance cooperation and networking among more and less experienced countryside civic groups and organisations in Hungary. To achieve this, the coalitions organised joint study tour/workshops for representatives of the mini-networks supported by the Civil Map projects (coordinated by Okotars) to two of the Open Spaces hubs in Debrecen and Szombathely (coordinated by Marom Klub), combined with skills and capacity building opportunities.