On 29 September 2026, ComActivate reflected on three years of work with multi-family apartment buildings across Bulgaria, Hungary and Lithuania at the project’s final conference in Brussels, bringing together 61 participants from EU institutions, national and local government, civil society and research. The event asked a pointed question: as new EU policies like the EPBD and Social Climate Plans move from adoption to implementation, what will it actually take to make them work on the ground?

This report documents the full proceeding: live-polling results that showed strong support for one-stop shops and the neighbourhood approach to renovation, a panel debating what makes a Resource Centre effective and who gets left out, and a fishbowl discussion on scaling renovation from single buildings to entire neighbourhoods. The report also includes the full consolidated conference minutes as an annex.

Recurring themes cut across every session:

• the need to start with people and fund genuine community engagement, not just construction
• the risk of “renovictions” pricing out the residents renovation is meant to help
• and the difficulty of communicating energy sufficiency, a concept that carries negative connotations in some post-socialist languages and contexts.

The report closes with seven key takeaways for practitioners and policymakers, from treating Resource Centres as a critical service akin to a hospital, to designing smarter, better-targeted subsidies, to keeping EU-funded projects people-centred as they scale beyond their pilots.

Download the report for the full polling results, panel discussions and conference minutes.