Investing For Systems Change: A Field Report From Katapult Future Fest
Editor's note: Ripple Effects usually comes from the UNLESS team. This week the pen (the keyboard) goes to our Chief Sustainability Officer and Co-Founder, Marissa Theodorou, writing from Amsterdam after two days at the Katapult Future Fest.
Most of my work happens remotely, away from my team and embedded in governance, Teams meetings and spreadsheets, in the business of where money goes and why. So spending two days in an old artist village close to the port of Amsterdam, with no laptops, surrounded by windmills and 1,000+ strangers, was not my usual week.
The village was Ruigoord, and the reason I was there was the Katapult Future Fest (KFF). KFF is an (almost) annual gathering built to accelerate positive change. Almost each year it pulls together a global community of changemakers, investors, founders, technologists and artists to look past the symptoms of our biggest problems to the root causes underneath, and to ask how impact investing, leadership and technology can build a fairer, healthier future. I went on behalf of UNLESS, because the festival asks the questions our team aims to tackle every day. What is capital actually for, and how can it be put to better use?
A village that shouldn't exist
Ruigoord has an interesting and resilient history. In the 1970s the village was marked for demolition so the Port of Amsterdam could expand, and most of its residents were moved on. Then the 1973 oil crisis stalled the port's plans, the houses sat empty, and a community of artists moved in and refused to leave. What grew up instead was a creative settlement that is still there today, legally recognised since 2000 and now a working cultural village rather than a squat.
I dwell on that history because the setting itself shaped the conversations of KFF. Two days in Ruigoord meant being emersed in the elements, sunshine on the Thursday, rain pouring through the tents on the Friday, lit bonfires, the sounds of goats in the distance, lunch under a tent and bundles of hay stacks to sit on. The setting gave people permission to unplug, slow down and actually talk to each other. I found myself in long conversations with people from different backgrounds and experiences, all of us meeting for the first time, but with a shared sense that we were there for the same reason - to accelerate growth towards positive change.
Enter the metamorphosis
This year's theme was "Enter the Metamorphosis", the idea that the old extractive economy is dissolving and we get to shape what grows in its place. The festival was built around five themes, each a different lens on the same question, how do we build what comes next?
The five themes were:
Culture, Creativity and Consciousness (imagination as infrastructure)
Deep Tech and Humanity (technology in service of humanity)
Investing for Systems Change (where capital meets conscience)
Ocean and Nature (partners in planetary regeneration)
Regenerative and Bioregional Futures (rooted in place, connected to planet).
I spent almost of my time in Investing for Systems Change themed sessions. With 48 sessions and 98 speakers in that theme alone, I could not get to everything, so what follows are the conversations and ideas that stayed with me in some of the sessions I was able to join.
Where capital meets conscience
The premise of the track is worth stating plainly, because it reframes what a lot of us in finance think we are doing. Most capital, even most well-intentioned capital, is optimised for short-term yield and competition. It works within the current system and tries to make it a little less harmful. Investing for systems change asks a harder question. How do we move money in a way that reshapes the underlying structures of power, ownership and decision-making, so capital becomes a coordination mechanism for long-term resilience and regeneration rather than extraction?
That is a big claim, and I want to be realistic about it. No single fund reshapes a market, but over a couple of days I watched a field of people take the idea seriously and, more usefully, get specific about how it might work in their field of practice.
The economic circus
The session everyone will remember was the Economics Circus, staged by Kate Raworth, the renegade economist behind Doughnut Economics and co-founder of the Doughnut Economics Action Lab. Billed as a "battle for the biosphere", it turned the clash between nature and finance into a literal performance with dress ups, involvement from the crowd, and a banana telephone being passed around the crowd. There were laughs, there was engagement and ultimately there was a mutual sense of frustration of the conflict between nature and finance in the real world.
Underneath the theatre was a serious argument. Nature is cyclical, relational and regenerative. Finance, the way we run it, is linear, extractive and built to accumulate. Raworth's question was whether finance can be redesigned to serve life, or whether, left alone, it will simply eat the Earth. Her energy carried the whole room, and her framing has stayed with me since. We unpacked her latest thinking when the framework was updated in our piece on how “The 2025 Doughnut Marks A New Chapter For Sustainable Economics”, and seeing it performed live made the design clash feel less academic and more like a choice we are actively making.
Steward-ownership, or making capital a servant
If the Economics Circus set the stakes, the Stewarding Capital session got practical about ownership. The premise was that steward-ownership is not only a legal structure but a cultural and psychological shift, and the guiding question was how you finance a company without turning it into a commodity to be sold.
Achim Hensen, co-founder of PURPOSE, the organisation that helped define steward-ownership, made the case that who owns a company is a design choice, one that can lock mission into its DNA so profit serves purpose rather than the other way around. Ebru Kaya Stürmer of atreyu brought the regenerative-capital angle, treating money as something to be stewarded in service of living systems. With practitioners like Marije Schasfoort and Michelle de Rijk of the Fair Capital Impact Fund in the session, the conversation moved quickly from theory to mechanics, how you actually structure capital, often with capped and non-controlling returns, so the money does not take back the steering wheel.
Financing living systems
The Bioregional Work in Practice session asked how you align capital with ecosystems rather than balance sheets. Leon Seefeld of Dark Matter Labs, who co-authored work on bioregional financing facilities, laid out the idea of community-governed capital structures that fund portfolios of regenerative projects at the scale of a watershed, with returns that do not strip the system bare. Eva Gladek, CEO and Founder of the Amsterdam circular-economy firm Metabolic, brought the hard systems analysis of how material and ecological flows actually move through a region.
What grounded it was the presence of people living the work, including Bu'ú Kennedy of the Institute Uhtabowii, an Indigenous leader from the Brazilian Amazon, and Stef van Dongen of Pioneers of Our Time, who is regenerating a watershed in Spain. The line I keep repeating since is that trees do not send invoices. If finance is going to work with living systems, it has to be redesigned around their rhythms, not around quarterly reporting. Ben Honan of Climate KIC put the same idea in terms of governance, that knowing when to use power and when to hold it back is central to this kind of work.
Who holds the power
The Power Sharing when Financing Change session was an interesting conversation about the politics of capital. The argument was simple and uncomfortable. Systems change needs more than money, it needs a shift in who holds power, who makes the decisions and who gets to define success.
Carol Gribnau of the DOEN Foundation, one of the most influential funders in Europe, spoke from the funder's seat about deliberately ceding control, devolving decisions to communities rather than imposing a donor's priorities. Pete Corke of Kwaxala offered the sharpest model, an Indigenous-majority-owned approach to protecting forest in which power sharing is built into the financial instrument itself, so local communities capture the value of the nature they protect. Gijsbert Koren of We Are Stewards closed the loop back to ownership, that the question of who legally holds a company, and who holds its voting rights as distinct from its economic rights, is the most durable way to lock in fairer long-term decisionsInsurance in super was built as a safety net, not a default setting.
The body knows things the spreadsheet doesn't
The session I was most skeptical about ended up being the one I think about most. From Stuck to Emerging, led by Ditri Zandstra of the Presencing Institute, was an embodied practice drawing on Theory U and Social Presencing Theatre. Instead of analysing a problem from the neck up, we used posture, movement and stillness to sense the difference between a system that feels stuck and one that is ready to move. It is hard to summarise something whose whole point is that it is felt rather than explained. But as someone who lives in models and numbers, the reminder that judgement is not purely analytical, and that good decisions draw on more than data, was a useful one to take home.
The elders in the room
One of the most grounding hours was the Intergenerational Dialogue with Charly and Lisa Kleissner, facilitated by the futurist Seren Dalkiran. The Kleissners are true pioneers of impact investing, co-founders of the KL Felicitas Foundation and of Toniic, the global network that helped turn impact investing from a fringe idea into an organised field. They committed all of their foundation's assets to impact long before that was normal. Hearing them reflect on that arc, from scepticism in the early 2000s to today's mainstream capital, while younger changemakers pushed them on where the movement has gone soft, was a reminder that this work is generational. Their throughline was stewardship over ownership, and impact as a legacy rather than a transaction.
The questions nobody had answers to
Some of the most honest moments were in the Friday open space circles, participant-led conversations in the field behind the church with no billed speakers and no tidy conclusions. People gathered around real questions such as: How do impact founders and investors exit without betraying the mission? What is missing from systemic investing, and are we just repackaging old portfolio theory? Is impact measurement any good, and who do the metrics really serve, investors' comfort or communities' reality?
Nobody solved these in an hour in a sandy field, and that was the point. The willingness to sit in the open questions, rather than rush to a confident answer, felt closer to honest than a lot of polished conference panels I have sat through.
The conversations between the sessions
The thing the programm does not capture is that some of the most valuable moments happened in the gaps between the sessions. Queuing for an iced coffee in the Thursday sun, I got talking to Margot, who grows building insulation from mushroom mycelium and was at the festival looking for patient capital that would not push her to scale faster than the material allows. Over a vegan kebab at one of the long communal tables, I sat next to Tomas, a former video-game designer now building immersive experiences that drop people inside a coral reef so they feel what is at stake rather than read about it.
Neither works in finance. Both are doing original work in fields I rarely brush up against, and both, in different ways, are bumping into the same wall. The structures that move money are not yet built for what they are trying to do. There is something clarifying about hearing your own industry's blind spots described by people who do not share its assumptions.
What I took home
The frontier of ethical and impact investing is moving. Choosing greener assets is the easy part. The harder, more interesting work is redesigning how capital is owned, governed and directed, so that money becomes a tool for coordination and regeneration rather than extraction. Steward-ownership, bioregional finance and power sharing are not fringe curiosities. They are early attempts to answer a question that should concern anyone with a superannuation balance. Who controls capital, and on whose behalf?
The ripple runs in layers. At a personal level, it changes what you ask of your own money, from what it is invested in to how it is owned and who it answers to. At a system level, ownership and governance models reshape how capital behaves over time. And at the broadest level, if enough capital is redesigned to follow long-term need rather than short-term return, it starts to shift what our economy is actually for. One line from the festival sums up the gap we still have to close: money and value are not the same thing, and we are still surprisingly bad at showing where real value is created.
This is the work we care about at UNLESS, helping people put their capital to work in line with what they actually believe. The conversations in Ruigoord left me more convinced that the next chapter of ethical investing is about ownership and power, as much as screening.
The work worth doing
The good news for you is that you do not need to travel to a field in Amsterdam to act on any of this. The most useful thing most of us can do is look a little harder at the capital we already have. Next time you review your super or your investments, look past what they hold to how those companies and funds are owned and governed, and who gets to decide what success looks like. Your fund has a website and an engagement policy, and both are worth ten minutes of your time. And if a piece of this shifted how you think, even slightly, pass it on to someone wrestling with the same questions. The festival's whole premise is that change happens through connection, in rooms and fields full of people deciding to build things differently. The more of us asking better questions of our money, the harder that work is to ignore. Make your money. Make a differnce.
This article contains general information only and does not constitute personal financial advice. UNLESS Financial Pty Ltd (ABN 45 682 935 306) is authorised to provide financial services. Before acting on any information in this article, consider whether it is appropriate for your personal circumstances. You should seek advice from a licensed financial adviser.
Sources and further reading
Dark Matter Labs | [Bioregional Financing Facilities: Reimagining Finance to Regenerate Our Planet] (https://darkmatterlabs.org) | 2024 | Community-governed, watershed-scale financing structures.
Doughnut Economics Action Lab | [Kate Raworth and the Doughnut model] (https://www.kateraworth.com) | 2026 | The nature-versus-finance design clash and the Doughnut framing.
Katapult Future Fest | [Programme: Investing for Systems Change] (https://katapultfuturefest.com/programme) | 2026 | Festival themes, session descriptions and speakers.
KL Felicitas Foundation and Toniic | [The Kleissners and the impact investing movement] (https://klfelicitasfoundation.org) | 2026 | History and scale of organised impact investing.
Metabolic | [Eva Gladek on circular and systemic design] (https://www.metabolic.nl) | 2026 | Regional material and ecological flow analysis.
Presencing Institute | [Social Presencing Theatre and Theory U] (https://www.presencing.org) | 2026 | Embodied practice in systems transition.
PURPOSE / Purpose Foundation | [Steward-ownership] (https://purpose-economy.org) | 2026 | Steward-ownership as ownership design.
