UpSide is building the future of civil society.

A flourishing future depends on a healthy civil society that can hold power to account. Yet the odds are increasingly stacked against those who advocate for the common good. EU corporate lobby spending has grown by 50% since 2020, an influence NGOs cannot come close to matching. The EU passed over 2,570 legal acts in 2025 alone, and advocates describe being overwhelmed trying to keep track as the windows that matter slip past. AI threatens to concentrate power further and faster, because the better-resourced organisations are adopting it first.

The result: civil society too often lacks the power to win legislative change, even when the evidence and people's needs urgently demand it. The expertise and the commitment are there. The shared infrastructure to make them compound is not. So we are building it.

Our platform scales the intelligence and strategy capabilities of advocacy: getting advocates up to speed on a policy area, tracking amendments and policymaker positions on live legislative files, and finding collaborators across member states. Three builds are in development with pilot partners across public health, animal welfare, AI risk and the environment. One scored how 37 European countries regulate emerging nicotine products across 55 provisions each, and was presented in May 2026 at Europe's largest tobacco-control conference and at the European Parliament.

Alongside building for now, we research what to build next. Our foresight research, grounded in interviews with 30+ advocates across 20+ NGOs, maps what civil society must become to keep pace with AI, and directs which solutions we work on.

Initial grant funding is secured, with further applications under review. We are raising now to take this from three pilots to sector-wide infrastructure. If you fund advocacy, or your organisation works on it, we would like to hear from you. Our funding memo and research findings are available on request

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