Our new way of working.
Across Europe, humanitarian services, rights-based advocacy and civil society efforts are collapsing under the weight of escalating needs, political hostility, and funding erosion. What has historically been a crisis of scarcity has become a structural breakdown of support systems, trust and cooperation that once held the movement together.
For Collective Aid, this moment demands more than adaptation. It demands a transformation of how civil society actors operate, partner, and protect one another; a deliberate shift toward Strategic Mutualism grounded in shared capacity, shared infrastructure, and shared voice.
The environment we are facing.
We operate across regions where forcibly displaced people are increasingly pushed into informal and violent border zones. Over the last year nearly 1,800+ testimonies of abuse and violence were collected by organisations working across Serbia, Bosnia, Greece, France and Bulgaria. NFI, WASH and material support needs have surged. Survivors of border violence, GBV and trauma have diminishing access to safe spaces and overall this is pushing more and more people towards exclusion and forced invisibility.
At the same time, the movement is shrinking. While displacement grows, solidarity is disappearing. Advocacy thins. Institutions retreat. Frontline actors and local civil society groups are close to collapse.
We cannot face this alone. Nor should we.
Strategic Ethos.
Strategic Mutualism is an ethic of abundance and solidarity. It means reminding ourselves and our partners that we are surrounded by rich knowledge, capacity, resources and support. Committing to sharing such things requires us to also prepare to share risk, ensuring so no one faces pressure alone and no one faces collapse alone. That requires infrastructure, so we stop duplicating efforts, share our findings and support each other properly. The result of this, is greater legitimacy than any single organisation could ever achieve, distributing voice and solidarity fairly.
The sector we are in is entirely full of partnerships in name, but this sector also lacks trust, power-sharing, and vulnerability. Strategic Mutualism calls for that which is deeper: collaboration as mutual protection and not performance. We believe the future of the work that we do will be decided not by individual success stories, but by whether the ecosystem survives together.
Our Theory of Change.
Problem: Services for and the rights of forcibly displaced people are eroding amid legal hostility, underfunding, and fractured civil society coordination.
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Hypothesis: If we implement mutualist partnerships and embed field-based, rights-focused services with strategic advocacy, then displaced people will access protection and the wider movement will become more resilient because risk, power, and infrastructure will be distributed across trusted networks.
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Mechanisms and Assumptions: Co-authorship with civil society; lived experience-led design; real-time data from Feedback, Complaint and Response Mechanisms (FCRM); regional service-advocacy integration. Partners will co-own risks; funders will support relationship infrastructure; shared legitimacy will improve service stability; trauma-informed systems will reduce harm.
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Contribution: We influence EU border policy through evidence and testimony; deliver aid in high-risk zones; co-develop local protection systems.
We have built this theory of change on the following integrated objectives to ensure we deliver the necessary material support while contributing to a more secure civil society locally where we work, regionally and internationally across Europe:
Mutual Protection Model:
We will pool infrastructure with our partners by 2026 to ensure continuity of services and advocacy across the locations we operate, supporting our individual partners to avoid shutdown.
Integrated Advocacy and Service:
Every service output we operate and support will feed directly into system focussed advocacy, operating better testimony collection and feedback loops to ensure self-advocates can lead accountability efforts.
Visibility Equity Principle:
We are committed to distributing visibility fairly both internally and externally. No actor within Collective Aid or among our partners hoards greater legitimacy, funding appeal or importance, we all need each other.
Experts by Experience Leadership:
Lived experience should be embedded not in a manner that is tokenistic, but as a power-sharing principle in design, budgeting, and impact evaluation.
Will you stand with us?
Overall this strategy is about ensuring Collective Aid is working to resist pressures facing the entire movement. We are no longer just a service provider, we are becoming a movement node, and we need your help to do this.
Our strategy is built by the people around us and we are delighted to hear from anyone who is interested others talk about embedded, humble, mutualist and accountable work.
This strategy only works if we do it together.
Funders
If you are pivoting to support civil society resilience, network response and not just project outputs, then let’s talk.
Civil Society Groups
Join us today! Let us work together to survive, co-develop and build risk-sharing partnerships.
Individuals
Help us survive this year and help to ensure everyone makes it to 2026. Look at how you can help or potentially even consider becoming a monthly donor to ensure our work continues.
Solidarity is a commons.
Strategic Mutualism is our principled, structured, scalable proposal for the future of civil society in Europe. Solidarity will not survive while there are organisations dedicated to protecting their brands and entities prepared to let their partners collapse. We want to be the organisation protecting the ecosystem that keeps us alive.
Solidarity and resistance is not granted. It is cultivated and it is vital that it is defended.
Join us and build the scaffolding that holds us all together.