The EFA26 Labs

The Lab convenes stakeholders from policy, business, philanthropy, civil society, and local governance. Rather than replicating existing recovery conferences or donor coordination mechanisms, the Lab aims to create a trusted and interdisciplinary space where strategic reflection meets implementation realities. At its core lies the understanding that Ukraine’s recovery is not only a national challenge, but a defining question for Europe’s future resilience, democratic stability, and capacity to act. Structured around interconnected perspectives such as political economy, geopolitical realities, and societal resilience, the Lab seeks to foster meaningful cross-sector exchange, coalition building, and actionable insights.

The Lab is organised together with and funded by ERSTE Foundation in partnership with Foundations for Ukraine.

The third edition of the Responsible Leadership Lab wraps up a three-year process aimed at deepening cross-sector dialogue on responsible leadership and the commitment to democratic and civic values. By uniting the three target sectors - business, civil society and politics - we aim to forge alliances around concrete projects and initiatives. After focusing on civil society organisations in the first Lab in 2024, on companies and corporate leaders in the second in 2025, this year’s Lab will turn to local political leaders, who engage in public-private partnerships around civic projects. The main goal of the Lab remains to safeguard democracy by countering polarisation and strengthening social cohesion by developing practical strategies and forging cross-sector alliances for depolarised discussion and communal collaboration.

The Lab is organised together with THE CIVICS Innovation Hub and Love Politics, and it is funded by Robert Bosch Foundation. 
 

This Lab brings together practitioners from civil society, independent media, and the broader democratic ecosystem to foster collaboration across sectors that too often operate in parallel. Its goal is to move beyond diagnosis and develop concrete, actionable interventions that strengthen the public interest information infrastructure on which democratic societies depend. Through structured exchanges, case-based learning, and collaborative working sessions, participants will jointly identify systemic challenges and co-create practical solutions that can be implemented, adapted, and scaled to reinforce resilient, credible, and accessible information ecosystems.

The Lab is facilitated by D-HUB and initiated and funded by ERSTE Foundation. 

The Hackathon is designed to foster hands-on collaboration around AI-driven financial literacy solutions for women and girls. Bringing together educational organizations and early-stage EdTech startups in a participatory and interdisciplinary setting, it supports projects that already serve this target group or aim to reach it through innovative financial education offerings. Projects will address a specific growth challenge and work closely with national and international experts in finance, economics, education, entrepreneurship, and scaling.  Beyond the intellectual challenge, the Hackathon also offers substantial rewards: two outstanding projects will each receive a prize of € 5,000.

The Lab is facilitated and funded by the MEGA Education Foundation and ERSTE Foundation. 

The Lab brings together leading experts, policymakers, foundations and practitioners to discuss how financial education can be strengthened as a strategic priority for Europe and how greater collaboration can create systemic impact across countries and sectors. Participants will engage in focused dialogue and collaborative working sessions to explore the future role of financial education in Europe, identify policy and advocacy priorities and contribute to shaping the strategic direction of the emerging European Alliance for Financial Education (FIN.€). 

The Lab is facilitated by Three Coins and FIN.€ and funded by ERSTE Foundation. 

This Lab gathers policymakers, researchers, practitioners, and community actors, otherwise often working in siloes, to collaboratively identify trade-offs, dilemmas and synergies around the ‘triple integration’ of climate mitigation, adaptation and carbon removal into coherent and stream-lined urban climate action. The Lab seeks to function as a common learning platform for participants with different backgrounds and to provide a space for collective understanding.

The Lab is guided by the expert team from Driving Urban Transitions (DUT) and funded by Mercator Foundation Germany. 

This Lab is a practice-oriented coordination space that turns ongoing collaborative work of its cohort into concrete, field-ready action by applying principles of the 10x100 learning and coordination platform. The Lab’s ambition is to outline and document practical coordination prototypes that actors can reuse, enabling coordination capacity to travel across neighbourhoods, cities, and bioregions.

The Lab is facilitated by experts from Politics for Tomorrow and funded by the Mercator Foundation Switzerland. 

Alpbach in Motion (AIM) is a Lab for up to 40 outstanding professionals between the ages of 30 to 40, who are willing to shape and transform Europe. Committed young business leaders, changemakers, policymakers, scientists, artists, activists, and more, commit to a one-of-a-kind leadership experience. By stimulating peer-to-peer learning and out-of-the-box solutions, AIM creates a space for the emergence of reflection and action. In line with the European Forum Alpbach mission to shape a stronger Europe for the good of all, AIM encourages its professionals to facilitate change in their industries, ecosystems and the broader social context.

The cohort is facilitated by Verena Gruber-Sytchev from fifty1 and Annamaria Toth from the European Forum Alpbach, with inputs from industry leaders, changemakers, and policymakers, who will contribute through expert working sessions.