Our Values

What drives our work with members, with partners, within our team


Equity and fairness // Everyone at Energy Cities is on an equal footing as persons. Everyone is entitled to express their opinions and be heard, and should listen in return. There is no tolerance for discrimination of any kind.

The way we work is as important as the work we do // Holacracy is an internal way of sharing responsibilities which places human at the centre of our work and decision-making. It allows for each team member to be autonomous in fulfilling their missions while making decisions collectively when required and in a cooperative way. Moreover, at Energy Cities the right balance between our personal and work life is the number one priority in the human resources policy.

A place for everyone to contribute and grow // At Energy Cities, all of us as team members are encouraged to find a balance between the organisation’s needs and our individual aspirations. “Standing on two feet”: learning and contributing. At Energy Cities everyone is entitled to feel engaged, useful and motivated in the activities performed. This means that everyone is encouraged to change roles and perform different activities, in all due respect to the other team members and to our commitments as an organisation.

Sufficiency // Talking about the planet’s resources, about our daily work or cooperation activities with our partners and members, at Energy Cities sufficiency is a driver for change.

Leading by doing // For three decades Energy Cities has been working to make cities greener and more sustainable. As leaders in sustainability we also strive to reduce the environmental impact of our own operations as much as possible.

Size does not matter… // There are no such things as “small” changes: there are only changes. There is no such thing as a “small” town, there are only places. For Energy Cities, capital cities have no greater say in the debates than towns and villages.

…What matters is the links // We believe that the current crisis will only be solved by linking people, places, sectors… As a network, our raison d’être is to create connections.

Empower and entrust // We do not tell cities what to do. We offer tools and resources for them to deliver their desired strategy. We provide them accurate information and give them keys to understand the systems so that they can make their own, informed choices. We believe that there are no such things as “best practices”, each city follows its own learning path.

We are cities’ megaphone // We convey their demands to the EU and national institutions. We speak for them when they entitle us to do so, but never in their place. We don’t give them ready-to-use answers, we help them ask themselves the relevant questions and to find their tailored and bespoke solutions.

We believe in cooperation // What we produce is open access: the best thing that can happen to a great idea or product is to be adopted by many. The more accessible resources and tools are, the faster we will achieve the necessary changes.

What is Holacracy

At Energy Cities, we chose several years ago to test other ways of running our activity from the inside. It has led us to switch from a traditional management system to a method called "holacracy"...