Action hub
The action hub is where everything comes together. It’s the centre space of the festival, to meet, exchange ideas, and get inspired. Besides the plenary programme with exciting impulses and discussions, you are invited to visit the market area, where civic educators from across Europe present their work, to stop by the spotlight stage for short talks and fresh impulses, or to even host a spontaneous 30-minute session on your own within our open space. Whether you’re here to share, listen, or just see what’s happening – this is a place for new connections and collaboration.
Where: Marmorsalen at Sentralen, 2-4 September
- HistoriCall: Flipping European History,digital resources for civic and history education
House of European History, Belgium
Project booth
HistoriCall is a free digital toolbox, available in 24 EU languages, designed for secondary school teachers of history, civics, and languages. Developed by the House of European History, it brings European history to life by creating personal connections to historical figures and events. The toolbox fosters values and leadership skills to inspire engaged European citizens.
At our booth, we will focus on the EU Pioneers module. Participants will be invited to explore the re-imagined social media profile of Simone Veil, Conrad Adenauer or Robert Schuman, not as distant icons, but as real people with values, dilemmas, and visions. They will watch short animated videos, and discover illustrations and texts that make their stories engaging and accessible. Participants will walk away with ready-to-use materials and practical ideas for using HistoriCall in their classrooms
Links:
House of European History, Learning offer : https://historia.europa.eu/en/learn
HistoriCall on the House of European History website: https://historia.europa.eu/en/learn/historicall
- Mapping civic education in Europe & The European Responsible Leadership Network programme (ReLEAD)
Leonie Sichtermann, Damir Mužina
Project booth
Mapping civic education in Europe is a programme that explores non-formal and informal civic education across 31 European countries. It identifies key topics, target groups, and cooperation among civic educators, while analyzing their needs to strengthen European civil society. Central to the programme is the CIVICS NETWORK MAP – an online tool featuring over 700 civic educators and fostering collaboration across the sector.
ReLEAD is a network of businesses that participate in a comprehensive online training programme to equip employees with key civic and social leadership skills. Designed for employees, the programme blends self-study, group workshops, and a practical toolbox to build skills that benefit both the workplace and society. By engaging companies across Europe, ReLEAD promotes civic-minded, resilient, and socially responsible leadership, taking civic learning in the workplace to the next level.
At our booth, we will showcase the interactive CIVICS NETWORK MAP on a screen to catch visitors’ attention where participants can explore the MAP themselves – zooming into specific country contexts or taking a comparative look at civic education ecosystems across Europe. It’s an engaging tool designed to spark curiosity and deeper understanding. We will also feature a sample of the physical ReLEAD toolbox, one of the programme’s core components – a practical resource for civic education and civic and social leadership development.
Links:
Mapping civic education in Europe: https://mapping.thecivics.eu
ReLEAD: https://thecivics.eu/projects/relead/
Super-Wal-Kiermes: Let’s choose hope
Zentrum fir politesch Bildung (ZpB), Luxembourg
Project booth
The Super-Wal-Kiermes is a fairground booth that invites people to engage in face-to-face discussions on various topics of citizenship education – including the theme of hope. Three interactive games provide a playful way of learning about and exploring democracy:
- Iddie fëschen (Duck Fishing):Each duck presents a topic that encourages participants to discover their own perspectives and reflect on potential challenges.
- Rad vun der Verännerung (Wheel of Change):A fortune wheel with questions about participation, encouraging players to reflect on their hopes for the future and how they can contribute to making them a reality.
- Zesumme bauen (Building Together):The goal is to lay the foundations of democracy and keep everything in balance, helping participants recognize their priorities – while reflecting on how hope can support and sustain a democratic society.
Join us to play these games with us on-site and share their individual hopes.
Links:
- Mapping hope: a data visualisation project
HOPE not hate, UK
Project booth
We showcase how HOPE not hate uses data to drive social change. Our primary aim is to equip the progressive sector with data-driven insights for more effective, targeted campaigning that addresses underlying drivers of issues at a local level, moving beyond national or regional campaigns.
At our booth we will let visitors explore our extensive polling data on excerpts of our polling questions, focused on attitudes towards immigration and levels of community optimism. The goal is to start a conversation about the underlying issues shaping people in the UK’s view on these issues. Visitors will be able to explore the data on an interactive and zoomable map that they pan around and view. They can select where on the map to look at data based on their geographic knowledge of London and their issues of interest. Next to this, we will share reports and case studies of our campaigns to show how our research and data informs on-the-ground strategies for building hopeful and inclusive communities.
Links:
Example of data map of Reform UK voters plus segmentation: https://hopenothate.org.uk/reform-party-2024/
Other examples of segmentation:
- Fear and HOPE report: https://hopenothate.org.uk/fear-and-hope-2024/
- Young people report: https://hopenothate.org.uk/plugged-in/
- Shaping our Future – Young Climate Professionals
Project booth
This booth brings together three youth-led initiatives from the Young Climate Professionals (YCP) programme, all working at the intersection of sustainability, climate action, and civic engagement. Each project explores different approaches to empowering young people to take climate-related action in their local communities through education, synergies with art, and participatory methods.
Designed as an interactive and hands-on space, the booth invites visitors to engage with each project individually while also exploring the shared goal of building more sustainable futures through active citizenship. Whether through haptic exploration, stories, or visual materials, participants can discover how young people across Europe are shaping climate solutions from the ground up. The booth reflects the diversity of approaches within the YCP programme and offers space for dialogue, experimentation, and future collaboration.
Our booth is designed as a modular, interactive space where visitors are invited to move between projects which together, form a shared landscape of youth-driven initiatives tackling environmental challenges in creative and hands-on ways. Our booth also invites visitors to come up with their own ideas that can shape a worthwhile living future. This Information is collected creatively and invites for connection and discussion.
Links:
- Regenerative Economics for Secondary Schools
Project booth
Regenerative economies strengthen social and ecological systems. It’s time for economics education to show us how. We are shifting economics education in secondary schools by creating flexible, comprehensive, open- access online resources for students and teachers to learn about and take action for human and ecological wellbeing.
We plan to showcase our work and featured learning materials on Regen Econ One-pagers, our open-access, online textbook, Doughnut Speed-dating Game, Planetary Boundaries Game, Scarcity versus Sufficiency Storyboard.
Links:
www.regenerativeeconomics.earth
https://www.youtube.com/@RegenerativeEconomics
Civics through play
Project booth
The world has a lot of problems. To build the future, we must learn to come together to find solutions to our most pressing challenges. We are on a mission to create playful experiences that help students develop the key skills necessary to empower them to become civically minded adults. From futures thinking to social emotional learning, we invite you to reimagine what civic engagement looks like so the classroom becomes a space where young people can practice like they will play.
Our goals are to:
- Explore the world of futures and how it can encourage us to become better citizens
- Demonstrate the link between social emotional learning and civic engagement
- Uncover how to apply various concepts and methodologies in your context to support skill-building for active citizenship
Our booth will demonstrate the work of Civics Through Play and share tools and learning materials that educators can use to create playful experiences in their contexts.
Links:
https://civicsthroughplay.com/
www.preventingpolarization.com
- Hope Box: Unboxing hope – Imagining futures through creativity and participation
Project booth
Hope Box is a participatory project that invites people to imagine a future worth looking forward to. Born out of the REWIRE Incubation Programme (2024–2025), it blends civic imagination, storytelling, and creative expression to explore how hope can become a tool for agency and connection—especially in social environments marked by disillusionment. We asked a simple but powerful question: What if you had a magical box that contained your ideal future—what would be inside?
At our booth at the NECE Festival 2025 Action Hub, visitors will encounter an interactive installation built around the concept of the Hope Box. This space invites participants to pause, reflect, and creatively engage with the idea of a desirable future.
Participants will be prompted with our central question: “What would your ideal future look like, and what would you place in a Hope Box to represent it?” They can respond in two ways:
- Physically, by crafting their own miniature Hope Box using a variety of arts & crafts materials.
- Digitally, by using AI-generated imagery tools at the booth to visualize their future scenes.
The booth will feature:
- A visually engaging display of the five themes of collective hope identified through the project: inclusive education, accessible healthcare, human-centered environments, solidarity, and everyday heroism.
- Selected AI-generated artworks and quotes from past participants.
- A “Hope Wall” where visitors can share their thoughts or stick Post-it notes representing their own hopeful visions.
- On-the-spot co-creation with facilitators guiding short reflective exercises.
Links:
https://rewiredemocracy.substack.com/p/what-does-a-hopeful-future-look-like
- Visualizing power with the Decolonial Film Festival
Project booth
The goal of this project, inspired by one of our educational workshops, is to question how power is represented in cinema and the images we perceive daily on social media. It is mainly destined for a young audience, to learn how to engage critically with visual imagery – to become active spectators instead of passive consumers. This consists of analyzing filmmaking choices, power dynamics between character relationships, and how communities are portrayed, through the screening of specific visual examples and in- depth discussions with participants.
At our booth, we will first ask participants a series of questions: what do you visualise in your mind when you think of power? When you watch a film, do you think of who has power in a certain scene? How are you able to identify this? These first warm-up questions allow participants to brainstorm reflections around a notion that is known to us all: power.
We will show extracts from films that we have screened at the Decolonial Film Festival (such as West Indies by Med Hondo or Sucre Amer by Christian Lara) that exemplify these types of representations, and aim to deconstruct mainstream narratives through a decolonial lens. Social media content available on Instagram or TikTok will also be shown to serve as examples of how cinematographic tools are used in other contemporary means of image- making. The goal is to nurture a form of digital literacy that identifies how visual portrayals dehumanize or rehumanize people and can therefore shape social perceptions.
Links:
Project booth
The European Wergeland Centre presents educational materials like the Little Big Handbook of Democracy and Understanding & Promoting Roma Inclusion in Education – offering visitors the opportunity to connect and exchange with EWC colleagues and to get familiar with new materials within education for democracy and human rights.
LIV (The sustainable living assistant app)
Project booth
LIV is a Sustainable Living Assistant app designed to help individuals reduce the environmental impact of their wardrobes. It addresses fast fashion’s challenges of overconsumption, waste, and lack of transparency of by offering tools such as a virtual closet, CO2 tracker, and sustainability education content to enhance green literacy.
At our booth, we will showcase the beta version of LIV – the Sustainable Living Assistant App. The goal is to test the app with a wide audience before launch and gather user feedback in a fun, hands-on way. Visitors will be able to download the app via a QR code (TestFlight install), scan clothing items on display and their own clothing labels to see real-time CO2 footprint estimates and also explore LIV’s features like the virtual closet, wardrobe impact tracker, and sustainability guidance.
Spotlight stage: New civic education curriculum in Poland. Learning through action.
3 September, 11:00 – 11:30 am (Marmorsalen)
Poland has recently introduced a new civic education curriculum for secondary schools, inspired and initiated by civil society organisations acting within SOS for Education network, created in 2020 to protest against the harmful actions of the previous right-wing administration and to propose constructive changes in education under the present liberal-left government. The course combines three core elements: knowledge about social and political processes, competencies to act in the public sphere, and agency — including a belief in one’s civic efficacy and the courage to act.
If implemented successfully, it will reach one million students over three years, resulting in four million civic activities and 200,000 group projects. This model has been adopted as a framework for the broader curriculum reform planned for 2026–2032, raising hopes that a balanced approach — integrating knowledge, competencies, and agency — will become a central feature of the mainstream education system.
Against this back drop, we will be presenting the role CSOs played in transforming the curriculum and practice of CE in Poland (Alicja Pacewicz) and highlighting the key features of the new CE curriculum (Jędrzej Witkowski). Our inputs will be accompanied by concrete examples of CSO actions that led to this success story, as well as insights from the curriculum and guidelines for teachers – providing learnings, takeaways, hope, and inspiration for other civil society actors working on, and hoping to influence, civic education reforms in their own countries too.
University of Glasgow
Spotlight stage: Promoting democracy online: The Power of social media campaigns.
3 September, 2:30 – 3:00 pm (Marmorsalen)
In this session, Prof. Anja Neundorf will present insights from her experimental research on the effectiveness of short, animated online videos to promote the virtues of democracy in shaping democratic attitudes and behaviours. Conducted across 33 countries – including both democracies and dictatorships from around the world – the study shows that these campaigns on social media yielded consistently positive results in varied political and economic environments. The results demonstrate that these online videos positively impact – even after two weeks – key outcomes, such as bolstering preference for democracy, reducing approval for non-democratic forms of governance, increasing the inclination to vote for democratic candidates, increasing knowledge about key components of liberal democracy, enhancing respondents’ political engagement, and decreasing the negative impacts of partisan polarisation – offering potential takeaways for civic educators on how to leverage accessible digital tools to strengthen democratic values.