The solutions Asia needs are already being built, by farmers, educators, and community innovators across the region.
Across Asia, the solutions communities need already exist. The challenge is rarely the absence of an idea, it is the absence of the connective tissue that allows good ideas to find each other, collaborate, and travel. Social innovators working in food systems, education, and community resilience are often doing extraordinary work in isolation, unable to reach the people, resources, or partnerships that would let them go further.
Catalyst Now is the infrastructure that changes that. This session tells that story through member-led initiatives: Regional Agri-Food Transition Asia Pacific (RAFT-APAC) network, which connects food system innovators across Asia who were previously working in isolation; and ASEAN Rising, which activates universities across Malaysia, Indonesia, and Vietnam as anchors for education-to-enterprise pathways, built by the practitioners already doing the work. But these are two examples of a much wider movement. Many other collaboratives and chapters across the region and the globe are doing the same: Pacific Pathways in Oceania, the First Nations collaborative, the Mental Health network,
social enterprise roadmaps in the Philippines and Bangladesh, ecosystem builders in Kazakhstan and Nepal, among others. The session asks the audience, funders, policymakers, business leaders, and ecosystem builders from across the world, to understand what this infrastructure makes possible, and to consider how they can help resource it. For funders, this raises a broader question: what would it take to strengthen the conditions in which these kinds of collaborations can emerge, connect, and thrive? The Ecosystem Funders Council brings together visionary funders committed to learning alongside social innovators, co-creating new approaches to strengthening ecosystems, and exploring how philanthropy can better enable long-term, systemic change.
