Why CitizensLab?

Traditional societal models—fragmented, mechanistic, hierarchical—are failing us. We’re facing converging crises: ecological collapse, democratic erosion, social fragmentation, and a spiritual void. These aren’t just symptoms; they reveal the need for root-level change.

CitizensLab offers a different response. By embracing uncertainty, active experimentation, and iterative learning, we create space for inner-to-outer transformations that can’t be forced but can emerge.

Across Europe, local changemakers—whether artists, facilitators, activists, or cultural curators—are already pioneering regenerative alternatives. CitizensLab connects these local innovators, amplifies their practice, and fosters collaboration on a European scale.

CitizensLab is a living lab and community of practice for changemakers driving societal transformation. Through experiential learning, workshops, and gatherings, we explore regenerative ways of living, collective decision-making, and cultures of care. Our work integrates mind, heart, and body to reimagine democracy and build more just, connected communities.

Born in 2016, this network has been experimenting, prototyping and inventing with citizens new forms of expression, shared narratives, commonalities, shared spaces, real or symbolic. Since November 2020 CitizensLab has become a registered NGO in Berlin, aiming at working locally as well as internationally.

CitizensLab´s actors are active in different sectors and contexts across wider-Europe.
Community organisers, curators of spaces for active citizens, artists and performers of new societies, urban public space re-inventors, activists, disturbers, societal innovators, participatory leaders – people who are able to break out of our own bubbles and hierarchies in a non-violent way and who want to create alternative European encounters that speak to all people.

Its members consider themselves a community of practice committed to changing the society in which we live to co-create a more participatory, diverse, transparent, inclusive, democratic and accountable communities.

We collectively explore ‘How our diverse practices can create a culture of commoning, care and kinship?‘.

In the CitizensLab active citizens co-create cross-sectoral spaces to share experiences and knowledge, but also to together experiment and prototype in our local contexts. By connecting a wide variety of civil society actors CitizensLab can also become a new system of influence. Seeking eye-to-eye communication with the European institutional ecosystem we foster a more inclusive political participation of citizens in shaping our societies.

In its incipit phase (2016-2018) it was coordinated by MitOst e.V. with the support of Stiftung Mercator, Robert Bosch Stiftung and the European Cultural Foundation.
And since 2020 we are operating as a self-organised platform and as an NGO registered in Berlin.

We envision communities, societies where:

Every voice counts, regardless of background or social status.

Schools, arts, and public spaces become sites of active civic engagement.

Communities—including migrants and refugees—have the autonomy to co-design solutions rooted in their lived context.

Solidarity, care, and inclusion replace hierarchies of power.

Through our networked approach, we help spark and sustain these alternative futures—showing that new forms of democracy are needed and that have to be regenerative, relational, and rooted in collective flourishing.