Co-creation
Community organizing
Visioning

Helping the cdH become Les Engagés with a massive grassroots on- and offline campaign

Dreaming of a better tomorrow and a stronger party

Dreamocracy advised in 2019 the cdH, a Belgian centrist political party. We helped design and implement the party’s on- and offline outreach campaign to transform itself into a new political movement. This led to the creation of Les Engagés, a party that has performed much better in recent elections.

The project involved designing and helping implement large citizen in-person deliberations as well as strategy sessions focused on internal identity and outreach strategy, using a wide variety of collective intelligence approaches. Working hand-in-hand with the leading French civic tech firm CapCollectif, this unprecedented process for a Belgian party allowed it to ask fundamental questions and find original answers, from the grassroots to the highest echelons of the party.

This daring campaign, inspired notably by the Danish The Alternative, gave non-party members and the wider public the means to co-design a better future over the whole of 2020 and beyond, as the campaign lasted longer than initially planned because of the Covid pandemic. Factoring in the period of confinement was a huge challenge that the movement successfully tackled.

Dream Parties to stimulate collective imagination

“Politics is not about dreaming!” we often hear. But what if it was time to dream and remake the world, or at least improve our lives? What would progress look like? How could we have more confidence in the future? Or even make Belgium the happiest country in the world?

The objectives of the Dream Parties that Dreamocracy developed for the cdH were to:

come up with clear formulations of what a desirable future looks like;
identify the values that this vision requires;
generate the enthusiasm to identify actions and implement them, keep up to date, participate in subsequent events and the digital platform.

The ‘Dream Party’ is a citizen dialogue format designed by Dreamocracy to allow participants to give free rein to their imagination in a joyful way and to draw concerted conclusions. It is the preferred format for launch events in local areas. It can, however, be used at other stages of a policy making or collaborative process. It is suitable for small groups (minimum 8) and large groups.

Essentially, the format allows all the participants to take part by alternating their roles, at certain moments in the ‘dream’ (free imagination) and at others in the more concrete aspects.

Services provided

Visioning and scenario planning
Narrative-based community organising
Developing bold democratic innovations
Inclusive, empathetic and emotionally intelligent community engagement

Impacts: a positive grassroots movement

The cdH rolled out a sustained programme of dozens of local meetings and online consultations, over almost two years. This led to a substantial revamp of its manifesto and political priorities, as well as branding. It helped it attract new talent. The results were very tangible in the 2024 EU, federal, regional and municipal elections.