Warsaw: Across the Union a particular kind of organisation is filling in application forms this summer: the women’s shelter that runs on volunteers, the anti-racism helpline, the memorial association keeping an uncomfortable history alive, the local group that teaches teenagers how a parliament works. These are the intended beneficiaries of the Citizens, Equality, Rights and Values programme, the EU’s main pot of money for civil society, and its 2026 calls for proposals are now open with roughly 305 million euros on the table across a dozen separate strands. The programme, usually shortened to CERV, was created in 2021 and runs to the end of 2027, which means the current round is among the last full cycles under the present budget. Its four pillars are easy to summarise and hard to deliver: protecting Union rights and values, promoting equality and fighting discrimination, encouraging citizens to take part in democratic life, and combating violence, including the domestic and gender-based violence covered by the old Daphne strand. The money is deliberately routed to local, regional and transnational groups rather than to governments, on the theory that a healthy democracy needs actors who do not answer to whoever happens to hold power. That theory is also the programme’s political fault line. In several member states the organisations most dependent on this funding are the same ones that national governments regard with suspicion, and the ones documenting rule-of-law problems that those governments would rather not see documented. CERV cannot substitute for a functioning national settlement, and its grants are modest against the scale of the problems they address. A few hundred thousand euros will not rebuild an independent judiciary or reverse a hostile media environment. What it can do is keep a threadbare civic infrastructure alive through lean years, which is not nothing when the alternative is closure. The design of the calls reflects hard lessons about who actually reaches the money. Small groups routinely lack the grant-writing staff and co-financing that the paperwork demands, so a disproportionate share has historically flowed to larger, better-resourced networks. The Commission has leaned on national contact points and re-granting intermediaries to push funds down to grassroots level, with mixed results. Applicants this year still face the familiar obstacle course of eligibility rules, partnership requirements and reporting obligations that can consume a chunk of the grant before any work begins. For all its limits, the programme matters as a signal as much as a subsidy. By writing rights, equality and democratic participation into a line of the EU budget, the Union commits itself, at least rhetorically, to treating civil society as infrastructure rather than decoration. The awkward question that hangs over the 2026 round is what happens after 2027, when the next long-term budget is negotiated amid competing demands from defence, industry and enlargement. Whether values funding survives that contest, and at what level, will say a good deal about the bloc’s priorities once the current calls have closed.