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.
Together, we’re building cross-movement solutions to strengthen civil society, starting with shared infrastructure advocates can use today.
Steph Kersten-Johnston, Peter Halliwell & Laura Picot · Amsterdam · Founded 2026
The challenge
Civil society is the democratic counterweight to institutions and powerful private interests, advocating for policy - one of the most impactful levers for lasting change - on behalf of people, living beings and the planet; the underrepresented and the unvoiced. Yet structural limitations hinder it from fulfilling this vital role.
The AI shift
AI threatens to concentrate power further and faster, with better-resourced organisations adopting AI capabilities more rapidly.1 As machine capability substitutes for human effort, influence drifts further from public voice. Without shared capability, the gap only widens.
+50% since 2020
EU corporate lobby spending has grown by 50% since 2020, and NGOs do not come close to matching that influence.2 This risks policy capture by narrow interests at the expense of the public good.3
2,570 acts in 2025
The EU passed over 2,570 legal acts in 2025 alone, plus thousands of preparatory acts.5 Advocates describe being overwhelmed trying to keep track,6 and the windows that matter can slip past.
Funding drift
Funding pressures push NGOs towards service provision, and further away from advocacy and contesting power.4 The organisations best placed to hold power to account are steered towards delivering services instead.
Fragmentation
Civil society largely remains divided into single-issue silos, reinforced by incumbent funding structures.7 Natural allies are often unable to combine into a shared movement, or to sustain work beyond the length of a single campaign grant.
The result: civil society too often lacks the power to win legislative change, even when the evidence and people’s needs urgently demand it. AI is set to widen that gap faster than advocates can close it. We are building shared infrastructure to close it.
Our approach
We envisage a future where civil society plays its full role in democratic policymaking: carrying citizens’ concerns into government, representing groups without a vote (such as future generations and other species), and increasing trust in democratic institutions. Organised civil society is the layer that turns public voice into policy outcomes.
Our work is to build the bridge from today’s civil society to that future, grounded in how advocates work now and guided by foresight research into what comes next.
Two parallel workstreams
An AI-powered infrastructure platform to scale the intelligence and strategy capabilities of civil society advocacy, in development now with pilot partners.
What we’re building ↓Research that maps a future vision for civil society and informs which solutions we work on next.
Our foresight research ↓Current state · Platform
Our work is focused on raising the quality of democratic deliberation and ensuring the part of society that represents citizens is equipped to work at the speed that information now moves.
Curated knowledge that gets ambitious advocates up to speed fast, as a flywheel for greater efficacy.
Tracks the amendments, policymaker positions and evidence base on live legislative files to create a narrative overview and help civil society achieve more targeted and repeatable policy wins.
Identifies new strategic collaborators across member states to help match advocates with well-placed allies.
Each build answers a need advocates told us about directly: better information, faster spotting of windows of opportunity, and more effective engagement with policymakers.6 All three are now in development with pilot partners.
Transparency and traceability is core to our information vision: every claim links back to primary sources, and position maps cover the full spectrum of actors, including where allies disagree.
Future state · Foresight
Civil society is one of democracy’s core building blocks. Our central research question is what it must become to keep pace with AI. Our foresight research maps that future and informs which solutions we work on next: some will be platform builds; others may go beyond AI infrastructure, for example bringing credible voices like scientists and doctors into advocacy.
To ground this, we have conducted cross-movement interviews and a focus group with 30+ advocates from 20+ food systems, public health, animal welfare, AI risk and environmental NGOs.6 With practitioners, funders and experts, we explore where civil society functions well today, how AI and shifting funding will reshape its operating backdrop, and how citizens can play a more central role. Our findings direct our next workstreams.
Where this goes
The prototypes are stage one of a deliberate path. Each stage compounds the last, and each is designed to be useful to advocates from day one.
Now
Three prototype builds in live use with pilot partners across public health, food systems, animal welfare and AI risk. Each is tested on a live policy file and proves a piece of the platform.
Next
The intelligence layer generalised into a single platform any advocacy organisation can plug into, across movements and member states, with a growing engineering team behind it.
Later
Shared intelligence between allied organisations, on their terms: cross-movement strategy and coordination at the scale that today’s challenges demand.
Initial grant funding is secured, with further applications under review. We are raising now to take this roadmap from pilots to sector-wide infrastructure.
“What UpSide is building sounds amazing, something everybody would be hoping for if they knew it was already in the making.”
How we work
We learn how your organisation handles policy intelligence, where the gaps are, and then we build. Every tool is tested with a partner organisation on a live policy file. The process itself is part of the product: working with us changes how your team thinks about knowledge, coordination and strategy.
We are currently working with a small number of pilot partners across European advocacy, always starting with public information and moving further only on your terms. If your organisation works on civil society causes and you recognise the problems described above, we would like to hear from you.
The team
We are three co-founders who each stepped away from established careers (Silicon Valley product development, two decades inside global corporations and NGOs, Oxford research) to build this. Working inside the Good Food Institute, the European Respiratory Society and the European Policy Centre, we each independently reached the same conclusion: the expertise and the commitment were there, but the shared infrastructure to make them compound was not. So we are building it. We are hiring a senior developer, and a part-time School for Moral Ambition fellow joins us from October.
Co-founder · Strategy & Operations
Leads strategy, pilot partnerships and operations. Steph spent 20 years building and scaling sustainability, circular-economy and food-systems programmes inside global corporations and NGOs, in the US and Europe. Most recently she worked on alternative protein advocacy at the Good Food Institute Europe. She turns strategy and funding into operating capacity. Based in Amsterdam.
Co-founder · Product & Comms
Leads UpSide’s technical architecture, product and intelligence system. Peter helped develop methods and products at Silicon Valley startups before moving into policy, and personally built UpSide’s first policy intelligence tools, now in use with pilot partners, during his role at the European Respiratory Society. 14 years across digital product, management consulting and corporate communications. Based in Hamburg.
Co-founder · Research & Engagement
Leads user and impact research, foresight and relationships. An Oxford PhD in food and climate, with previous specialist roles at the FAO, Systemiq and the European Policy Centre in Brussels; on the advisory board of TABLE, an impartial food systems knowledge platform. Laura keeps the platform grounded in evidence and its epistemics honest. Based in Amsterdam.
Live examples
Early versions of the builds above, tested with partner organisations on live policy files. The intelligence library and policy deep-dive are demonstrable today; ally discovery is at an earlier stage. We are starting with public health, animal welfare, AI risk and the environment.
Built with a major public health org
The policy deep-dive in practice: maps organisational positions against proposed legislative amendments, and flags where coalition partners agree and disagree. Built and tested with a major European public health organisation.
“Normally I’d spend days searching through these amendments; now it’s all analysed and presented in a much easier-to-understand format.”
Tested with an advocacy NGO
An early build of the intelligence library: maps who holds which positions on upcoming EU food regulation, covering organisations, policymakers and allied actors across multiple cause areas. Tested with an EU food-systems NGO.
“This would be gold. I’d spread this to everyone.”
Smoke Free Partnership · ECTOH & the European Parliament, May 2026
A second policy deep-dive: an AI pipeline scoring how 37 European countries regulate e-cigarettes, heated tobacco and nicotine pouches, across 55 provisions each and more than 2,000 data points. Developed in collaboration with Smoke Free Partnership, and presented in May 2026 at ECTOH (the European Conference on Tobacco or Health), Europe’s largest tobacco-control conference, and at the European Parliament to MEPs pressing for stricter rules.
“Worth weeks of manual work.”
Get involved
Do you see the same needs as us? Please reach out.
Try our tools on your live advocacy work, and shape what we build with your feedback. Pilots are focused, practical, and built around what your organisation needs.
info [at] up-side.orgCollaborate with us on foresight research, civic tech and democratic infrastructure. If you are building in this space and see the same needs, we would like to work together.
info [at] up-side.orgInitial grant funding is secured and further applications are under review. We are raising to take the platform from three pilots to cross-movement infrastructure. Our funding memo and research findings are available on request.
info [at] up-side.orgNot ready to talk yet? Follow our progress. We share occasional updates on what we are building and learning, when there is something worth sharing.
Follow us on LinkedIn1. TechSoup / Tapp, 2025: The State of AI in Nonprofits 2025
2. Corporate Europe Observatory, 2026: The EU corporate lobby league 2026; 2022: Who spends most?
3. OECD, 2021: Lobbying in the 21st Century
4. Salamon et al., 2013: The State of Global Civil Society and Volunteering
5. European Commission, 2025: EUR-Lex statistics
6. UpSide, 2026: semi-structured interviews and a focus group with 30+ NGO advocates (summary of findings available on request)
7. National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy, 2013: Smashing silos in philanthropy
