In 2025, the knowledge broker at CollectiveKracht investigated how citizen collectives manage archiving. What kinds of information do they preserve? How do they do it? What challenges do they encounter, and what support do they need?

Citizen collectives are a driving force behind social change. From energy cooperatives and care initiatives to food collectives and co-housing projects, they demonstrate how community spirit can be a powerful catalyst for change. But while they are building the future, something important risks being lost: the story of how they got there.

The stories, decisions, challenges, and successes of citizen collectives are valuable for both current and future initiatives. The history of how an initiative came into being, the steps it has taken, the partnerships it has formed, and the lessons it has learned together constitute an invaluable source of knowledge and inspiration.

Data Collection
A total of 31 representatives completed a questionnaire about how their organizations collect and preserve information. For each category of information, respondents indicated what types of data they retain. To gain deeper insight into archiving practices within citizen collectives, ten in-depth interviews were conducted following the survey.

Awareness
The study shows that citizen collectives incorporate archiving into their day-to-day work to some extent. Many participants actively engage in archiving, but their awareness is primarily focused on practical operational needs. Long-term preservation of information and the transfer of knowledge receive considerably less attention.

Challenges
Respondents face several challenges when building and maintaining an archive. Awareness of the importance of archiving is not always shared across the organization, making it difficult to involve members. Other common obstacles include finding files efficiently, preserving organizational knowledge, and storing information in compliance with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). A lack of time is a major underlying factor in many of these challenges.

A Common Pitfall
One of the biggest pitfalls is the lack of organization-wide commitment to archiving in everyday practice. Awareness of the value of archiving is strongest among citizen collectives that have already experienced the consequences of losing information or have benefited from maintaining a well-organized archive—for example, when measuring impact or preparing reports. In practice, however, organizations often lack the time or expertise to archive information systematically. As a result, it is often only after information has been lost that they realize how useful—or even essential—it would have been to have it available.

A potential role for CollectivePower
As a knowledge platform, CollectivePower can help address these challenges by introducing an archiving toolkit. A toolkit that includes a self-assessment and an improvement plan can raise awareness of the importance of archiving by providing practical guidance and resources. In addition, the platform can help develop a way for citizen collectives to share information that contributes to building the collective memory of the citizen collective movement.

In this way, CollectivePower can support individual citizen collectives in developing and maintaining their own archives for internal use, while also helping to build a shared memory of the broader citizen collective movement.