Grantees’ needs evolve, new challenges and opportunities constantly emerge, at the same time it is important to provide space and time for civil society and journalistic organisations to reinvent their strategies and approaches and build wider constituencies. There are plenty of important aspects of organisational strengthening that fall out of the scope of a typical grant application such as emerging collaborations, exchanges, specific thematic training opportunities, attending conferences and initiating cross-organisational visits.

Over the last years, CSOs all over Europe have voiced increasing concern about the legal and practical limitations affecting their work and their operating environment: including restrictions on freedoms of association, assembly or protest, administrative harassment, budget cuts or difficulties to access funding or reduced access to policy-makers and opportunities to participate in the policymaking process.

Since its inception in 2018, Civitates and its partner foundations have worked towards tackling issues impacting discourse online such as disinformation and the citizen’s information diet, polarisation, outdated rules or lack thereof, governing how it functions and the power that private companies hold.