Building the future
of Civil Society
Civil Society has the expertise to take on the harms that define our age. What it often lacks is the resource to turn that expertise into impact at speed and scale.
UpSide builds that capability as shared infrastructure owned by the organisations that use it.
Civil society is not short of expertise or commitment.It is short of the resources its opponents take for granted.
Known early, acted on late
The evidence of harm usually arrives years, sometimes decades, before the law does. The bottleneck is rarely the knowledge. It is the resource and the standing to act on it in time.
Out-resourced
The organisations working for better regulation face industries with far deeper pockets and the persistence that money buys. The gap is resource, and what resource lets you do: outlast, out-staff, and persist.
Capacity consumed
Gathering and structuring intelligence by hand eats the capacity a small team has. By the time a policy window opens, the work of preparing for it has barely begun.
Knowledge that does not compound
Hard-won expertise sits in one person’s head or one organisation’s drive, and leaves when they do, because there is no shared, trusted place for it to live and grow.
The coalition stays out of reach
The voices that move a decision, scientists, farmers, doctors, investors, are rarely in the room at the moment they count. Bringing them in is its own job, and it is the first thing a stretched team has to drop.
This is not a capability failure but an infrastructure gap. And an infrastructure gap we believe can be closed.
When the infrastructure exists, everything else becomes possible
When civil society organisations have shared intelligence infrastructure, they do not just become more efficient. They become capable of a different kind of influence. They know which policy window is coming nine months before it opens. They know which voices carry credibility with which decision-makers. And they have the relationships, in place and maintained, to activate those voices at precisely the right moment.
That is the shift UpSide is building toward. Not NGOs doing more of the same with better tools. CSOs as the connective tissue of a much broader and more powerful coalition.
The information burden
Automate the intelligence work that consumes so much time, and give policy teams back the capacity to do what only people can do.
Build the coordination capability
Shared intelligence, aligned positions, coordinated timing. The infrastructure that lets organisations act with the coherence of a movement.
Activate the wider coalition
With the intelligence in place and the network primed, identify the moment, find the right messenger, and bring in the voices that shift the conversation.
A shared intelligence platform, owned by the people who use it
Two layers, a knowledge layer and an action layer, built with AI and held as a cooperative. Together they give advocacy organisations the capability their opponents can afford.
Shared, queryable intelligence
A knowledge base covering regulation, political signals and hard-won organisational knowledge, across cause areas and borders, built cooperatively by the organisations that use it.
Private by default, shared by consent. Public information is open to all whilst your organisation’s own data stays yours. Where organisations choose to pool intelligence, they do so on their own terms, under Chatham House rules. The platform finds the patterns across what everyone is willing to share, without exposing what any one organisation holds.
A radar for policy windows
Public consultations, legislative votes, strategy publications and Commission proposals, tracked, dated and surfaced before the deadline closes.
Preparation, not reaction: if a regulation is due in nine months, you start the strategy conversation now, not two months before the vote.
Owned, not rented. UpSide is a cooperative not-for-profit. The organisations that use the platform own it and govern it, and what is built on it is shared IP. Any power that comes from shared knowledge is shared power.
We are not starting from a slide deck
Working tools, tested with real organisations on real policy files. Each one a building block for the larger platform.
Amendment tracker, EU Tobacco Products Directive
Maps organisational positions against proposed legislative amendments. Flags where coalition partners agree and disagree. Built and tested with a major European public health organisation.
“It captures 80% of what’s in my head that took years to acquire.”
Senior policy lead, EU health NGO
File Tracker, EU food and alt-protein files
Maps who holds which positions on upcoming EU food regulation, covering organisations, policymakers and allied actors across multiple cause areas.
“This would be gold. I’d spread this to everyone.”
Advocate, EU food-systems NGO
Cross-country regulation scoring, Emerging Nicotine Products
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 — in days rather than the months it takes by hand. Presented 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.
Each of these tools tests a different piece of the platform. They are building blocks: useful now, designed to slot into the larger architecture as it grows.
What UpSide is building sounds amazing, something everybody would be hoping for if they knew it was already in the making.
Director, EU food system alliance, 2026
We start by embedding with your team
We learn how your organisation handles policy intelligence, what your current tools and processes look like, and where the gaps are. Then we build.
Every tool we create is tested with a real organisation on a real policy file. We do not build in the abstract. 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. If your organisation works on civil society causes and you recognise the problems described above, we would like to hear from you.
How the relationship develops mirrors how trust develops. We start with public information, the intelligence layer that asks nothing from your organisation. Once that is working, and you have seen what it produces, we move toward coordination: shared intelligence across organisations, on your terms, when you are ready.
Built by people who worked inside these organisations
We met through the School for Moral Ambition fellowship, each placed inside a European advocacy organisation for our fellowship year. Independently, we found the same thing: the expertise was there, the commitment was there, the capability to make any of it compound was not. UpSide is our response.
SKStephanie Kersten-Johnston
Co-founder
Fundraising & Strategy Lead
Leads fundraising, pilot partnerships and strategy. A background across systems consulting, food systems, health advocacy and social innovation. A School for Moral Ambition fellow placed at the Good Food Institute Europe, working on alternative protein advocacy. Based in Amsterdam.
LinkedIn →
LPLaura Picot
Co-founder
Research & Methodology Lead
Leads user research, workshop design and methodology. An Oxford PhD in food security and climate adaptation, previously at FAO, Systemiq and the European Policy Centre in Brussels, and an advisory board member of TABLE. Based in Amsterdam.
LinkedIn →
PHPeter Halliwell
Co-founder
Technical Lead
A background across climate science, management consulting, Silicon Valley startups and digital product development. Built UpSide’s first policy intelligence tools during his School for Moral Ambition fellowship at the European Respiratory Society. Leads UpSide’s technical architecture, product and intelligence system. Based in Hamburg.
LinkedIn →UpSide grew out of a shared conviction: civil society has the expertise and the commitment, but not the shared infrastructure to use them well. We are building what we wished existed when we were inside the organisations we now serve.
Currently operating under the fiscal sponsorship of the School for Moral Ambition
Three ways to work with us
Pilot partner
If your organisation works on European advocacy and you recognise the problems described above, we would like to hear from you. Pilots are focused, practical, and built around what your organisation actually needs.
info@up-side.orgFunder
We are building the infrastructure layer that makes all the campaigns you fund more effective. If you believe civil society needs better tools for coordination, we are happy to talk.
info@up-side.orgFollow our progress
We send occasional updates: what we are building, what we are learning, where we are. No cadence, just when something is worth sharing.