The CIDSE secretariat is pleased to share its 2025 Annual Report, which reflects on the challenges and hopes that have shaped this past year’s collective journey. Rather than merely documenting activities, the report invites readers to look beyond the struggles to the resilience, courage and solidarity that continue to inspire the work of CIDSE, which completed 60 years in 2025.
Below is a message from the CIDSE Secretary General offering a personal reflection on the past year and the vision that will guide us into the future.
Here we are, looking back on the events of 2025 and sharing what we have achieved and what we have learned together throughout this turbulent period. The global context as well as the European policy environment continued to present us with some important challenges, and we sought to face them in solidarity while seizing the opportunities we could detect and put our energies in spaces and processes where we could make a difference and strengthen our impact.
These are the stories and experiences that we have collected in CIDSE’s Annual Report. They serve to give witness to the actions we carried forward together as a community. One of these great moments of collective action was during COP30 and the Peoples’ Summit in Belém. This was a tremendous show of hope and faith in the alternative economic and political systems we believe in and are willing to build together. Through our grief at the violence and destruction imposed on people and our common home, we resisted by expressing joy in the power of solidarity and social and ecological justice. And we celebrated this throughout the year, while CIDSE marked 60 years of journeying together for peace and justice.
This past year, we lost a great guide and leader in Pope Francis and welcomed the arrival of Pope Leo XIV, who has not only continued the call for ecological justice and conversion but reminded us of how intricately interlinked this is with our responsibility to create and foster a world of peace. We have seen fear and grief around the world and seen people silenced for speaking the truth, but this has also shown us how strong we are together with allies, friends, and partners, and how we can model the solidarity, peace, courage, and justice we want to see in the world.
Please read our annual report through these eyes and help us notice together and lift up every whisper of story where life and justice shine their light.
Thank you for being on this journey with us and holding the line for the past 60 years and the coming years.
Josianne Gauthier
CIDSE Secretary General
CIDSE contact: Giorgio Gotra, Operations & Communication manager, (gotra(at)cidse.org)
Cover photo: “Like a River, Celebrating 60 Years of CIDSE”, Brussels, October 2025.
The boats carried messages from participants to CIDSE for the next 10 years. Credit: CIDSE.