Annual Report 2024
Laying the New Groundwork
At the Digital Freedom Fund, the urgency of our mission has never been clearer. As authoritarianism rises and digital platforms are used more to repress rather than empower, we remain committed to defending human rights across Europe. In 2024, we supported strategic litigation in 25 countries, challenging the harms of Big Tech, invasive surveillance, and discriminatory algorithms. We also received more grant applications than ever before, which is clear evidence of the growing need for strategic litigation within the digital rights community. We successfully concluded our two-year digiRISE project and, in keeping with our values, transitioned away from a one-director structure, embracing a distributed leadership model rooted in shared responsibility and collective care.
We are profoundly grateful for the continued support of our funders and our digital rights community, whose solidarity makes this work possible. As we navigate an increasingly unpredictable and high-risk environment, we remain grounded and ready to advance our mission with purpose and prepared to respond swiftly as new challenges emerge.
Highlights from the Year 2024
Shifts in the organisational structure
After a year-long staff-led collaborative process to adapt DFF’s structure to our organisational needs and values, DFF adopted a distributed leadership model in June 2024. The new model moves away from a single director hierarchy and distributes leadership throughout the organisation, putting decision-making with those closest to the work.
The distributed leadership model included not only electing two Co-Directors, but also shifting the whole organisational structure into a four-level model with each layer representing a type of function at DFF:
• Programmatic layer
• Operational layer
• Coordination layer
• Leadership layer
Since the beginning of 2024, we have operated under the new flatter structure, completing a full programme without any setbacks. We have organised five events, including our annual strategy meeting, produced complex deliverables, especially for the digiRISE program, and ran two grant application calls. Furthermore, the staff as a whole is now more motivated to work because we have more control over our daily tasks.
Strategic Litigation Support Programme
2024 was our most popular year for grant applications, with 83 applications received. This included reaching the significant milestone of EUR 4 million granted since we started in 2018. We’ve now made over 120 grants. In 2024, including additional funds for ongoing grants, we provided nearly EUR 900,000 of funding support to 25 projects across 14 countries, including France, Germany, Ireland, Hungary, the Netherlands, Poland, Serbia, Spain, Turkey, Ukraine, the United Kingdom, as well as one pro- ject at the Court of Justice of the European Union and one related to the European Commission. We also approved the first-ever grants for Albania and Malta.
Community Programme
In 2024, we coordinated five community events, including our seventh annual strategy meeting in March, a collective redress consultation and feedback workshop in early June, a strategic litigation retreat in late June, and two workshops on collective action for platform accountability in September and November, respectively. Overall, our five events in 2024 were attended by 116 different people from 87 different organisations. Our capacity-building and networking opportunity outreach efforts in the digital rights community and beyond continue to grow, with a record 41 organisations attending DFF events for the first time in 2024, the highest number to date.
