Focusing on two initiatives working within disadvantaged urban neighborhoods in Bucharest and Lisbon, we want to discuss the civil society’s capacity to adapt to the changing social opportunities and difficul-ties, and its ability to create equal access to resources and opportunities. We propose to compare some aspects of both initiatives in these two historical and socio-political Southern European urban contexts, trying to better understand these processes: what they manage to do; what they find hard to do; who helps them; their relationships with different state structures (municipality, schools, national agencies etc.); their relationships with different people in the area of work; their future perspective, and so on. Our diverse social activist and academic background in anthropological, sociological, geographical fields allows us to a deeper understanding of the strengths and limits of theoretical and practical dimensions of social research process, witch we would like to discuss, also
