Donors and partners
Help us secure the ground for CCE Lab
A physical environment is part of the research instrument, not merely infrastructure around it.
CoCreate Earth Foundation is a Dutch non-profit dedicated to one of the most overlooked problems in sustainable development: the gap between our intention to collaborate and our actual ability to do it.
Our first programme, CCE Lab, is a research and education centre designed to study, measure, and systematise the underlying mechanics of human collaboration—producing open-source tools and protocols that any organisation can use.
CoCreate Earth Foundation was founded by two practitioners with more than 15 years of combined experience in decentralised governance, collective intelligence, and social-change work, including leadership within a major global environmental movement.
The United Nations' SDG 17—Partnerships for the Goals—points to the capability behind all the others: the art and science of collaboration itself. Very few organisations are dedicated to studying, measuring, and improving the underlying mechanics and conditions that make the rest possible.
What CCE Labs delivers
A research environment: a proving ground and experimental sandbox in which modular collaboration protocols, governance models, facilitation patterns, and learning formats can be designed, tested, measured, and refined under real-world conditions.
An application environment: an incubating ground for education and ideation that builds deep expertise in hosting multicultural co-learning environments and the conditions that allow diverse groups to work and create together well.
One example is a six-month residency cohort of eight collaboration practitioners from four countries, living and working together on a shared design challenge, with weekly protocol-testing sessions documented and measured against an agreed framework, producing a peer-reviewed facilitation playbook at the end.
Another example is an educational eco-hostel: a stay-to-learn hospitality model immersed in nature, where guests experience regenerative living and explore practices in ecological awareness, relationships, and group dynamics.
Donors and partners
The path to an operational site involves more than land. It involves infrastructure that rural land in nature rarely provides: power, water, basic shelters, and equipment for group work.
We are looking for founding patrons—people or organisations who believe this work matters enough to help kick-start it or walk alongside it. We are not asking for a fixed amount because the right site, moment, and level of support are things we would rather discover with the right partners than decide alone in advance.
We are open to different forms of partnership. If this resonates and sparks ideas, write to us. We would love to talk.
Why a physical place?
Collaboration cannot be prototyped in isolation. We need people, and people need an environment in which collaboration can be lived—not merely theorised or simulated. Just as research needs equipment, research into real collaboration patterns needs a social laboratory. The environment is part of the research instrument: equipment for making invisible dynamics visible.
We are developing digital environments and tools. But long-term collaboration patterns—the kind that reveal deep, layered dynamics and produce adaptable insight—require continuous engagement. An online space alone cannot substitute for that. Neither can a temporary venue: the work needs the freedom to redesign spaces as research demands and enough time for trust, conflict, repair, co-creation, and learning to cycle through completely.
The integrity of longitudinal research requires social and financial stability. Owning the land would allow the work to run to completion on its own terms. The physical ground is not only infrastructure for the work; it is a methodological decision.
With or without external support, we will find our way to this space. Contribution can collapse the timeline—and the years of opportunity cost that delay represents for the field.