By: Youth Co-Design Team The challenges of grassroots activism Citizens are organising and mobilising in new and creative ways.

By Andrew Firmin, editor-in-chief of CIVICUS Our efforts as civil society will work best when paired with mass mobilisations that demonstrate popular support for rights and defiance in the face of those who seek to deny rights, including by counter-protesting when anti-rights forces seek to claim public space and dominate public discourse.

CIVICUS invited its member, the West Africa Civil Society Institute (WACSI) to facilitate a proposal writing and resource mobilisation workshop for staff in 2019.

By Josef Benedict, civic space research officer at CIVICUS The assault on fundamental freedoms and civil society is escalating across the globe.

Dear CIVICUS members and allies, We are ending the year as we began – with awe for how civil society and citizens have been unstoppable despite widespread and often brutal backlash by governments, and with a stronger resolve to do more - much more - to reinforce struggles for human rights and social justice across countries and communities.

By Yessenia Soto, Community Engagement Officer on Civil Society Resourcing at CIVICUS In 2019, CIVICUS set out to find ways to better support and resource citizen action in the 21st century.

From the 30th October to the 8th November 2019 members gathered in Johannesburg, South Africa from all over the world for the CIVICUS Annual General meeting.

From 2 to 15 December, more than 20,000 people from almost 200 countries attended COP25, the UN climate change conference.

By Mohammad Hasan, Yes Theatre Palestine CIVICUS’ process to mid-term review its strategic plan (2017-2022) is almost finished.

This article is part of the #StoriesOfResilience series, coordinated by CIVICUS to feature groups and activists on their journey to promote better resourcing practices for civil society and to mobilise meaningful resources to sustain their work.

By Paul Mulindwa, advocacy and campaigns officer at CIVICUS Four years after Burundi’s crisis began, 300,000 people have fled the country for safety.

By Josef Benedict, civic space research officer at CIVICUS This November in Geneva, the United Nations examined Fiji’s human rights record for the third time.

By Masana Ndinga-Kanga, Crisis Response Fund lead at CIVICUS and Lundi Mazizi, co-ordinator of the UWC Ex-Workers Movement So much can happen in 900 days.

By Andreas Bummel the Executive Director of Democracy Without Borders, Lysa John Secretary-General of CIVICUS and Bruno Kaufmann is co-president of the Global Forum on Modern Direct Democracy and board member of Democracy International Next year the United Nations will commemorate its 75th anniversary.

By Ine Van Severen, Civic Space Researcher at CIVICUS 2019 has been a year of protest.

By Clara Bosco, civil society resourcing advisor at CIVICUS These last years have marked the tipping point of a growing disconnect between citizens and public institutions in Latin America.

Secretary General’s Update (Aug-Sep 2019) In the context of increasing attacks on civic space around the world, it seems far more unusual to have an opportunity to celebrate the progress being made through civil society and citizen activism around the world.

By Ziad Abdul Samad, Executive Director of the Arab NGO Network for Development (ANND) The popular protests in Lebanon began after the government announced its intention to impose new taxes on citizens and in an atmosphere of tension and mounting fears of continued economic collapse.

By Marina Cherbonnier, CIVICUS member engagement specialist Each year, CIVICUS Constituents are asked what they think about CIVICUS - a global alliance of over 8000 organisations, movements and individuals.

By Masana Ndinga-Kanga, Crisis Response Fund Lead at CIVICUS & Sohrab Razzaghi is Executive Director of Volunteer Activists Institute  2019 has not been a good year for Iranian human rights activists.

In an interview with @africanews @DaveKode speaks about the recent crackdown on protests and mass arrests of #HRDs, academics and journalists in #Egypt https://t.

Female leaders in 2018 top films were 4 times more likely to be shown in revealing clothing.

In October 2019, in New York, the UN General Assembly will elect 14 new members of the 47-member State Human Rights Council.

By David Kode, advocacy and campaigns lead at CIVICUS Sport is a major unifier among all nations and the plight of Eritrean athletes should be enough to force the international community, particularly states that now host many Eritreans, to exert pressure on President Isaias Afwerki to implement reforms, 26 years after taking power.

By Masana Ndinga-Kanga, Crisis Response Fund Lead at CIVICUS Since Jamal Khashoggi disappeared on October 2, 2018, in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, the Saudi authorities have continuously changed their narrative of what happened.

By Lysa John, Secretary-General of CIVICUS & Mandeep Tiwana, Chief Programmes Officer at CIVICUS 2019 may well be remembered as the year in which ordinary citizens finally lost patience with incremental changes and called for the bold and urgent actions we need to address the challenges we face.

By Lysa John, Secretary-General of CIVICUS From gun control marches in the United States to impassioned climate change speeches on the global stage of the UN, youth are leading the charge to hold governments accountable and address our biggest challenges.

By Clara Bosco, senior advisor on civil society at CIVICUS In recent years, inspiring funders and grassroots movements have experimented with different funding and organising models to better support smaller, local, spontaneous and less formal groups, and to make themselves more accountable to these.

*Interview with CIVICUS SG, Lysa John.

By Belen Giaquinta and Merle Rutz As a World Alliance, CIVICUS holds, in its essence and identity, the principles of “people power” and democratic values.

By Dominic Perera, CIVICUS Monitor Project Officer at CIVICUS Earlier this month, Bangladesh captured international headlines as an enormous fire ripped through an informal settlement in Dhaka’s Mirpur area.

By Josef Benedict, Civic Space Researcher at CIVICUS Since June 2019, over a million people have taken to the streets of Hong Kong on a weekly basis to demonstrate.

By David Kode, Advocacy and Campaigns Lead at CIVICUS Exactly four months after former President Omar Al-Bashir of Sudan was pushed out of power, and a few weeks after the military rulers and civilians signed a peace deal to thrash out the political transition, ordinary Sudanese continue to pay a heavy price.

Secretary General’s Update (July 2019) July has been an incredibly exciting month and I’m excited to share key headlines from our work in this period! Progressing our efforts on civil society resourcing reforms Since the start of this year, we have had the privilege to hear from activists, organisers, young leaders and progressive funders from around the world on the resourcing challenges faced by civil society – and to understand how bold ideas and creative solutions can help address these barriers.

By Natalia Gomez Peña, Advocacy & Network Engagement Officer, Vuka! Secretariat For the family of indigenous Guatemalan activist Jorge Juc, the announcement last week by US President Donald Trump of an agreement declaring Guatemala a “safe third country” could not be more bitterly ironic.

By Paul Mulindwa, an advocacy and campaigns officer with CIVICUS.

By Andrew Firmin & Sylvia Mbataru Human rights have always been contested, and groups that attack human rights are nothing new.

By Mandeep Tiwana, Chief Programmes Officer at CIVICUS Recent raids by the Central Bureau of Investigation on the homes and offices of human rights lawyers Anand Grover and Indira Jaising are deeply worrying.

Por Marianna Belalba Barreto y Belén Giaquinta Todxs aquellos interesados en la interfaz entre derechos humanos y la tecnología sabrán que el mes pasado se celebró RightsCon 2019 en Túnez.

This article is part of the #StoriesOfResilience series, coordinated by CIVICUS to feature groups and activists on their journey to promote better resourcing practices for civil society and to mobilise meaningful resources to sustain their work.

By Paul Mulindwa, an advocacy and campaigns officer with CIVICUS.

Spanish | French Diversity and Inclusion has become a hot topic within civil society in recent years which has prompted the sector to take a step back and evaluate its own programmes and operations.

By Jimm Chick Fomunjong, Head, Knowledge Management Unit, WACSI Civil society organisations (CSOs) across the globe thrive on the implementation of best practices.

By Helene Wolf, Chair, FAIR SHARE of Women Leaders Half of the delegates at CIVICUS’ International Civil Society Week (April, Belgrade) were women.

By Gioel Gioacchino, research consultant with CIVICUS As a keynote speaker at a global gathering of a thousand activists and NGO workers in Belgrade in April, the host of a popular Serbian television spoof news show, Zoran Kesic performed 24 minutes of brilliant (and cathartic) satire.

Dear members & friends of CIVICUS, The past weeks have been a busy but exciting time for a number of our networks and initiatives! We were proud to have hosted over 80 activists representing work on civic freedoms from across the world in Johannesburg in May for a dialogue with Clement Voule, UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Peaceful Assembly and Association (FoAA).

By Dinah Sandoval & Alexis Banks, Root Change This article is part of the #StoriesOfResilience series, coordinated by CIVICUS to feature groups and activists on their journey to promote better resourcing practices for civil society and to mobilise meaningful resources to sustain their work.

By Lysa John, Secretary-General of CIVICUS.

Did you know that most youth-led groups and movements operate with an annual budget of less than 10,000 USD? It´s known that young people in the activism and development sector in the Global South face significant resourcing challenges: little capacity to attract funding and comply with donor requirements; ​restricted social, political and economic spaces to participate and grow; extensive gaps between the funds available to serve youth versus those managed directly by youth, and significant disparities between the resourcing opportunities that target young individual leaders within groups and movements rather than to the group itself, just to mention a few.

By Mohammed Eid This story was facilitated by CIVICUS.