One Year of Commonground: Our Ground Zero Year
Commonground Initiatives is turning one year old. Today, we look back at our “Ground Zero Year”, celebrating small yet foundational achievements, and reflecting on the impact we made and the vision for what’s to come over the next few years.
A year ago, Laura and I received an email with the confirmation that our nonprofit, Commonground Initiatives, had been formally registered. We stared at each other and knew: it’s real!
We started Commonground Initiatives with a deep desire to bring the people back to the forefront of changemaking efforts.
In a world where multiple crises are challenging collective values and pillars of democracy, human rights and peace, we are committed to doing our part and contributing to protecting and fostering those values by elevating the power of people, collectivity and community agency.
This desire came from a double-layered frustration: traditional political leadership and practices are getting more and more removed from the everyday experience of citizens; organisations and institutions that lead the change mostly work at a very academic, institutional and exclusive level, failing to involve those whom they aim to benefit.
Driven by a vision where communities lead from the front, defining and designing efforts towards social and cultural impact through their own experience and visions, we built Commonground Initiative as an incubator for experimentation of projects, initiatives and movements where communities are part of the process, the beating heart of changemaking mechanisms and revitalised voices in the practice of impact.
This year was marked by moments of orientation, practices of exploration, and first-time pilots.
We decided to focus on the Euro-Mediterranean region and direct our focus to a space that presents unique challenges, but also is a womb of endless opportunities for sustainable and inclusive innovation.
We spent a lot of time understanding our role and position in the regional ecosystem, calibrating the resources and skills we can put into play, and the added value we can bring to partners and environments in the region. We sketched an organisational and player identity, whereas we act as enablers, accompaniment actresses, implementation partners and most importantly: community organisers.
We embraced limitations that naturally come with operating as a small, globally distributed team, acknowledging that we may not always look like the “perfect” team, that we won’t be the “experts” across the board of this mission, but rooted into a deep knowing that we’re embarking on our work with a genuine curiousity, an enthusiastic, impact-oriented and collaborative spirit where “doing it imperfectly and together” is better than “not doing it” or “doing it perfectly and alone”.
We rolled out two key initiatives that taught us a lot and rewarded us with great results.
Kairouan, Tunisia — Mutual Capacity Building with We Love Kairouan
Together with our local partner We Love Kairouan, we co-designed a mutual capacity-building program focused on youth engagement and community revitalisation. Through three participatory workshops, we explored the challenges faced by young people in re-engaging with civic life, exchanged good practices for community mobilisation, and identified strategies to make local projects more inclusive, creative, and sustainable. The program created space for cross-border exchanges, peer learning and mutual learning for strengthened impact strategies.
In our evaluation process of this partnership, we found that 80% of participants rated the insights and content shared during the sessions as very insightful, and 80% of participants rated the strategy inputs received during the sessions as very or extremely insightful.
The 60% of participants rated the acquisition of new tools that can be practically applied in their work as either good or excellent.
This helped us confirm that when we come together as organisations and exchange insights and experiences, we can expand the horizons of our perspectives and tools for change.
Monfalcone, Italy — Community Revitalisation and Political Innovation with Collettivo Onda
Our key program pilot took place in Monfalcone, where we incubated the creation of Collettivo Onda, a youth-led initiative reimagining how civic participation and local democracy can look in smaller, divided cities.
From April to now, the project mobilised over 50 young residents through public events and co-creation sessions, including the AperiOnda dialogue series, where we were able to bring together people from diverse slices of the local population to discuss how to make Monfalcone more inclusive and responsive to the needs of the local community.
What started as a local pilot is now growing into a platform for participatory dialogue and social innovation — an example of what community-led revitalisation can look like in practice.
Our Consultancy Journey: Strengthening CSOs through technical and strategic expertise.
Alongside our pilot programs and field work, we’ve also invested time and expertise in supporting other civil society organisations through fundraising, strategy, and impact measurement consultancies.
Over the past year, we have partnered with four international nonprofits and grassroots organisations, helping them refine their funding strategies, strengthen their organisational systems, and enhance their capacity to communicate and measure impact.
This consultancy journey has allowed us to build a financially sustainable model for the organisation, but it has been more than a revenue stream: it has been a learning space, allowing us to exchange insights with diverse teams across regions and understand the common challenges faced by organisations working for social change. Some of the organisations we worked with were Save The Children Germany e.V., Project Tres UG and aidóni, ranging from humanitarian aid, feminist decolonial empowerment and peace-building journalism.
By bridging our technical knowledge with our community-first philosophy, our consultancy accompaniment model aims to help other CSOs become more resilient, strategic, and impact-driven, while also reinforcing the financial sustainability of Commonground as an organisation.
Our first year has been a laboratory of learning.
Working across different contexts, from Italy to Tunisia, has helped us better understand what it takes to strengthen democratic practices and build truly community-led change. Here are some of the key insights we’re carrying forward:
Change takes time and relationships.
Strengthening democratic practices through a community-first approach is a slow and relational process. It depends on trust, mutual understanding, and time. Investing in trust and relationship building is a nonnegotiable in this process.
This work is inherently cross-functional and collaborative.
Democracy strengthening and community revitalisation can’t be done in standalone formats. This mission is by default collective and requires collaboration across sectors, openness to complexity, and the courage to experiment with new formats and hybrid practices, in communal effort with other actors and players.
Participation is the whole point.
Participation, and the lack of thereof, IS the root cause of declining democratic practices. We must start from here to rethink engagement, collective movements and community agency. In this sense, our work blends “back-to-basics” approaches (how to go back to being a community again?) with radically innovative, creative methods to reimagine how communities engage (how can we re-imagine community practices and building in times of deep change?)
Local ownership and external perspectives must coexist.
Sometimes, the most powerful change comes from enabling local actors to lead; other times, it’s sparked by fresh perspectives and models from elsewhere. We’ve learned that the balance, blending local ownership with cross-context learning, is where innovation truly happens.
Adaptation is not a weakness, it’s the way.
Operating in an adaptive, responsive and iterative way is not a sign of weak foundations nor confusion. As a small, early stage organisation, we want to make full use of this “stage” to experiment, shift, adapt and improve our approaches to fine-tune the way we operationalise our mission. Each shift taught us something valuable. Flexibility and a willingness to iterate are essential to learning, evolving, and strengthening our mission in practice.
Capacity and sustainability matter.
This work requires time, care, and resources. As a young organisation run on mostly volunteer capacity, we’ve often struggled to secure the paid time needed to execute our vision fully. Building financial sustainability is therefore not only an operational goal, but an ethical one — ensuring the people doing the work can keep doing it well.
Visibility is part of the mission.
Celebrating small achievements and sharing our story helps keep momentum and acts as a form of advocacy in itself. We’ve learned to embrace visibility not as self-promotion, but as a way to inspire, connect, and invite others to join the journey.
What Lies Ahead
As we close our Ground Zero Year, we do so with gratitude, excitement and determination. This first cycle has been about testing, listening, and learning, understanding how change can happen in today’s times, and when it starts from the ground.
As we look into the next year, we aim to call in some key processes:
Deepening our existing pilots, continuing to support Collettivo Onda in Monfalcone and our partnership with civil society organisations, helping both evolve into further more impactful models for community-led revitalisation.
Expanding our network across the Euro-Mediterranean region, connecting with new grassroots organisations, civic innovators, and funders who share our belief that democracy renewal starts locally in the hands of communities.
Strengthening our organisational backbone, securing resources to sustain our work and ensuring our core team has the paid capacity to keep nurturing and scaling impact with care and consistency.
Investing in research and knowledge sharing, documenting our methodologies, reflections, and learnings to make them accessible to others walking similar paths of participatory, community-first change.
Designing new collaborative pilots, especially around community engagement, democratic innovation, and local capacity building, blending creativity, technology, and grassroots leadership.
If you want to support our work and want to learn more about the projects we have in our pipeline, get in touch! We look forward to connecting with partners and supporters who want to move waves with us on this journey!
Margherita, Laura and Beatrice