There was something special about the Global Impact Summit. Aside from the brilliant content – which I’ll get to shortly – it felt like being part of something, a movement.

Held in Sydney from 5-6 August, the Summit grew out of the Impact Stage at SXSW Sydney and is the brainchild of Mike Gore, Joce Goto and James Kozina from nonprofit philanthropy platform Charitabl.

Designed to bring together corporates, funders, social enterprises and nonprofits, the Summit is all about connection and bringing different parts of the impact sector together. As someone whose lens is usually firmly focused on fundraising and philanthropy, I was particularly interested in stepping back and seeing a bigger picture – the different people, ideas, partnerships and approaches contributing to positive change.

And there was a lot to take in. Here are my highlights.

Uncle Allen Madden – welcoming us to Country

When James Kozina asked Uncle Allen how many times he had performed a Welcome to Country at the State Theatre – the Summit’s gorgeous venue for 5 August – Uncle Allen admitted he had lost count. But he did recall performing one there for the Sydney premiere of E.T. in 1982, so it was safe to say he had welcomed audiences to the theatre many times over the decades.

Uncle Allen is a Gadigal man from the Eora nation and, married with 10 children, he reminded us that “Where there’s a Will, there are relatives!”.

This was also the moment we were introduced to Chris Sebastian and his band, who returned to the stage throughout the day, their music providing the perfect backdrop to many of the Summit’s inspirational speakers. Chris is deeply involved in infant loss support and youth advocacy, and later in the day we would meet his brother Guy and Guy’s wife, Jules, who together run The Sebastian Foundation, with its focus on youth mental health. A remarkably talented family, matched by an equally strong commitment to giving back.

Daniel Flynn – the true cost of impact

“What is your ‘cost to serve’?” asked Daniel Flynn. Perhaps your organisation already has a figure for this: the cost of delivering a product, service or support to your ‘customer’ – which, for many nonprofits, means the people you help. It’s a useful measure of organisational productivity and, ultimately, that much-revered metric: return on investment (ROI).

Now imagine that figure was $2.6 million.

That’s the estimated cost attributed to each of the 12 boys – and their soccer coach – rescued from a Thai cave in 2018. Deeply moved by National Geographic’s documentary The Rescue, Daniel used the story to make a powerful point: impact is not one-size-fits-all, nor can its value always be neatly captured by a number.

Few of us would question whether those boys and their coach were worth saving. But if you knew in advance that an initiative would cost $2.6 million for every person it helped, would you pursue it? Judged purely by “cost to serve”, perhaps not. And therein lies the problem with relying too heavily on any single measure of impact.

Daniel’s second point was closely connected: never underestimate the power of a compelling story. The world became captivated by the plight of those trapped in the cave, prompting extraordinary people with specialist skills, expertise and technology to step forward and help. The numbers didn’t mobilise them; the human story did.

For nonprofits, that leaves a compelling question: do the stories you tell about your impact make people feel its significance as powerfully as your numbers demonstrate it?

Daniel’s reflections on the Thai cave rescue captured my attention, but another observation also stayed with me. Daniel is well known in our sector and beyond, but for those less familiar with his story, he is the co-founder of Australian personal care brand and social enterprise Thankyou. Founded in 2008, Thankyou exists to harness consumer spending for good, directing every cent left after costs towards its mission to help end extreme poverty. To date it has distributed $20.03 million to impact partners across the world.

Many of you may remember that Thankyou used to include a Track Your Impact (TYI) number on its products – unique codes printed on individual product packaging that customers could enter on the Thankyou website to view the international development project funded by that purchase. It was certainly a compelling initiative – one grounded in transparency that gave a voice to partners doing amazing work on the ground. But it came at a cost – the burden of extra reporting on local partners. TYI went on hiatus in 2020 and you can read more about the decision here.

It’s an important reminder for funders in all their forms – such as trusts and foundations, social enterprises like Thankyou, or more traditional charities that both fundraise and fund – that reporting on impact takes time. And every hour spent reporting is an hour away from delivering a project. Reporting requirements therefore need to serve a clear purpose: capturing what matters, building a meaningful picture of impact and informing future practice. Because reporting should never come at the expense of the work itself – or, ultimately, those the work exists to help.

The future is bright

I want to take a moment to mention the four incredible young people who featured in the ‘A World I See’ session.

Jack – who, at the age of 10, founded A Fiver for a Farmer to support Australia’s farmers in times of crises – whether they be droughts, fires, floods, plagues or the pandemic. To date his initiative has raised $2.4 million.

Ashutosh – who, inspired by his neurodivergent brother, founded Ashan Industries which is developing a communication technology that will help neurodiverse individuals express themselves and communicate in a way that suits their unique needs. Through scholarships, awards and donations, Ashutosh has raised over $60,000 for his business.

Haya – a Junior Ambassador for Vision Australia who lives with visual impairment. Haya shared her hopes, dreams and ideas for what a future for people who are blind or have low vision could look like. “Organisations like Vision Australia prepare us for the world. But is the world prepared for us?” she asked.

Milla – an inspiring young public speaker who uses her voice to inspire and uplift. She questioned if the notion of ‘growing up’ can be an excuse for holding back – “Sometimes I think maturity is just fear dressed up in a suit,” she said, and it certainly made me reflect on how much braver I often was in my younger years!

As the session ended, the delegate sitting next to me said “Wow, the future is bright,” and I couldn’t agree more. Read more about this inspiring session here.

HalfCut – protecting nature through partnership

Half of Australia’s forests have disappeared since European settlement began, a devastating fact that inspired Jimmy Stanton-Cooke and Jessica Clarke to establish HalfCut in 2014.

The organisation’s name symbolises the 50% loss of the forest ecosystem and a long-running fundraising initiative – Go HalfCut – encourages the community to shave half a beard, braid half their hair or cut their clothing in half (the list goes on!) to spark conversations and raise money. So committed to this idea is Jimmy that he has sported half a beard for seven years!

But catchy fundraisers aside, what I loved about this session was two things. One, the acknowledgement that First Nations people have been caring for this continent for 60,000 years – “[They] still hold the knowledge. They still hold the authority,” says the HalfCut website. “What they have often not held is the resources, the platform, or the power to act at the scale their knowledge deserves. HalfCut exists to change that, not by adding our voice to theirs, but by getting out of the way and making sure the resources land where they always should have.” To do this, HalfCut are on a mission to raise funds to buy back the Daintree Rainforest and then hand it to Traditional Owners to manage.

Next, two awesome partnerships.

For six years (and counting), Ben & Jerry’s has supported HalfCut in a variety of ways – through in-company Go HalfCut fundraisers, half-price ice cream flavours from which 100% of sales are donated, and in-store round-up and donation opportunities. Together, these efforts have raised more than $600,000.

GreenPay is a payments platform built on the idea that every transaction can help protect nature, with the company giving 50% of its profits to conservation and biodiversity projects through the GreenPay Foundation. GreenPay has partnered with HalfCut and Jabalbina Aboriginal Corporation to help secure and rewild Daintree River Station, 203 hectares of precious rainforest habitat that will once again be home to endangered cassowaries and other wildlife.

What both partnerships demonstrate is deep alignment. For 40 years, Ben & Jerry’s has championed progressive social change and engaged its employees in that work. For GreenPay, giving wasn’t something added to the business; the business itself grew from a mission to conserve Australian nature.

And HalfCut – with its commitment to the environment, community-led initiatives and opportunities for staff engagement – is a natural fit for both.

Mobilise – choosing brave over easy

If there was one phrase that captured this session, it was “brave over easy”.

It’s a principle Mobilise founder Noah Yang says the organisation kept returning to when an ambitious young electrician named Nedd Brockmann came knocking. Nedd had already caught Noah’s attention after completing 50 marathons in 50 days and raising $50,000 for homelessness. Then Nedd approached Noah with a considerably bigger proposition – he wanted to raise $1 million for Mobilise.

Importantly, Nedd didn’t just want to fundraise for an organisation; he wanted to feel part of it. That relationship would eventually help propel both Nedd and Mobilise into the national spotlight. In 2022, Nedd became one of the fastest people to run across Australia, and his fundraising efforts have now generated around $10 million for Mobilise.

Behind the extraordinary physical feats is an extraordinarily straightforward motivation. “Why are we putting our head in the sand about something that should not be happening?” Nedd asked of homelessness. “Let’s help. It’s that simple.”

Today, Mobilise has distributed more than $4 million to people in need and helped 1500 people move into accommodation. But perhaps the most interesting part of this story is how it chose to help.

Faced with the prospect of Nedd raising an unprecedented amount of money, Noah and his team took their time to build the systems needed to put those funds to work effectively. The result was Mobilise Matched, a program based on Direct Cash Transfers – essentially, giving money directly to people experiencing homelessness and trusting them to know what they need.

It sounds simple. But it was a difficult idea to fund.

Noah had seen evidence from around the world supporting Direct Cash Transfers, and the Paul Ramsay Foundation backed the program early on. But plenty of other funders said no. And therein lies a much bigger question for philanthropy.

Funders understandably want evidence that the programs they support will work. But if we only fund approaches that already have an established evidence base, do we risk funding the same solutions over and over again – even when some clearly aren’t solving the problem?

“In the business of saving lives, we are disincentivising innovation,” Noah said.

Perhaps, then, alongside asking “What if it goes wrong?”, we need to get better at asking Noah’s alternative: “What could be possible if it goes right?”

Mobilise now has some answers. Its latest impact data shows that every $1 invested through Mobilise generates $6 in social and economic value. “Our product is cash – and if done right – it’s one of the most powerful forms of help. The data shows that,” Noah said.

There are, of course, assumptions to overcome. One Noah highlighted is the fear that giving people experiencing homelessness cash means it will be spent on drugs or alcohol. But the evidence Mobilise is gathering challenges that assumption – and, he argues, we can no longer use the fact that something hasn’t been done before, or simply feels different, as a reason not to try it.

It brought me back to “brave over easy”. Innovation involves discomfort. It means choosing a path where success isn’t guaranteed and being prepared to learn from what happens next. “Courage comes from doing something that has the potential of not working and doing it anyway,” said Nedd.

There was an interesting message here for funders, too. Noah talked about the concept of risk-adjusted returns and noted that Mobilise has found particular success engaging tech philanthropists – people accustomed to investing in ideas with uncertain outcomes but potentially transformative returns. What might philanthropy learn from that mindset? Particularly when, as Noah pointed out, the alternative to taking a calculated risk can be continuing to invest in approaches that aren’t achieving enough.

And Mobilise is still innovating. Noah mentioned a new technology offering designed to visualise where impact is happening, allowing funders to better connect their giving with the causes and communities they care about – say someone particularly interested in supporting victims and survivors of domestic violence in South Australia. In the coming months, Mobilise plans to make the product available to other nonprofits too.

Ultimately, though, this session wasn’t really about running across Australia, Direct Cash Transfers or technology. It was about ambition.

“This is the generation that should solve homelessness,” Noah said. “It’s a decision to try and solve, not just help – that’s an important distinction.”

That distinction stayed with me. Because there’s something wonderfully audacious about moving beyond “How can we help?” to “How can we actually solve this?” And perhaps tackling our seemingly impossible problems requires more of us – funders, nonprofits, businesses and individuals – to become a little more comfortable choosing brave over easy.

People shouldn’t have to be resilient. Systems should be.

That observation from UNICEF’s Elaine Jung gave me pause. We talk so often about the resilience of people and communities facing adversity as though it is something to celebrate – and, of course, it can be. But what if our admiration for people’s ability to endure difficult circumstances sometimes distracts us from asking why they are being required to endure them in the first place?

As Elaine put it, crises don’t just test systems; they reveal them.

So what does a strong system look like? Elaine pointed to several characteristics: it is locally-led, connects its different parts effectively, is built on trust and accountability, and is designed with the long-term in mind. Crucially, when a system works well, the burden doesn’t fall disproportionately on the people it is supposed to support – it is shared.

There was an important message here for funders and nonprofits about what we mean when we talk about lasting impact, too.

When the funding ends, what stays behind?

It’s a deceptively simple question. A project might deliver everything promised during its funding period, but what position does it leave a community in when that funding disappears? Are the relationships, knowledge and capacity still there? Most importantly, are communities better positioned to shape their own futures?

Strong partnerships, Elaine reminded us, learn over time. Perhaps that means our measure of a successful partnership shouldn’t simply be what it delivers while the money is flowing, but what remains – and who holds the power – afterwards.

It requires us to deepen our understanding of what lasting impact really looks like. Because ultimately, real progress is collective. And perhaps the most meaningful legacy we can leave isn’t a community that has become more resilient to a failing system, but a stronger system that no longer asks so much resilience of the people within it.

Funding beyond borders – growing philanthropy, keeping it human

With four panellists tackling the enormous topic of how funders can shape the future of global health impact, there was plenty of ground to cover. But a couple of relatively simple observations from this session stayed with me.

The first came from Vedran Drakulic of the Victoria Police Blue Ribbon Foundation: it’s not about the numbers, it’s about the stories. It echoed a theme that surfaced several times throughout the Summit – that while data helps us demonstrate impact, stories help us understand and connect with it.

Vedran also made a plea for something even simpler: funders need to get back to people. Anyone who has spent considerable time preparing a funding application only to hear nothing in return will appreciate the point. A “no” might be disappointing, but applicants still deserve a response. It was a useful reminder that philanthropy is, at its heart, about relationships – and respect for the time and effort of those seeking funding should be part of that.

There was another figure from the day that felt particularly relevant here. Catherine Brooks from Equitable Philanthropy, sponsor of the Summit track in which this session took place, shared a statistic from JBWere – Australia has only around 3000 giving vehicles when, based on our national wealth, we should have closer to 100,000.

That’s quite a gap – and an enormous opportunity.

And perhaps there’s a connection between the two ideas. If we want to encourage many more Australians to participate in philanthropy, growing the amount we give is only part of the challenge. We also need to nurture a culture of giving that remains human – one that values relationships, respects those doing the work and never loses sight of the people, causes and stories behind the numbers.

Collective action – solving problems bigger than any one organisation

“Wicked problems are never one thing,” said World Vision Australia CEO Grant Bayldon. And while there’s no shortage of ideas about how to tackle the world’s biggest challenges, what we often lack is alignment.

That’s understandable. There are a lot of problems to solve and plenty of people and organisations working hard on their particular piece of the puzzle. Getting everyone aligned around a bigger goal takes time and effort. But, as Atlassian Foundation’s Michelle Holmes put it, “If the problems are systemic, the solutions need to be systemic.”

So what does effective collective action require? Grant pointed to five things: a common agenda, shared measurement, activities that reinforce one another, continuous communication and strong backbone support.

Perhaps even more important is where you start. Grant’s first question is always: “What and who is already there in the community?” That might include farmers, community groups, local government, schools, universities and nonprofits – all bringing different expertise, relationships and resources to the same system.

He gave the example of World Vision’s work in Uganda, where around 100 organisations, including universities, form part of that system. It means there isn’t necessarily a neat ROI that can be attributed to one organisation, intervention or project. The impact comes from all the pieces working together – reductions in child malnutrition and conflict, for example, alongside other interconnected outcomes.

And critically, this isn’t about outsiders arriving with all the answers. Grant noted that 98% of World Vision’s staff in the countries where it operates are themselves from those countries.

For funders, collective action requires a different mindset too. As Michelle pointed out, this isn’t the familiar model of one grantee, one project, one grant report. The work takes time, and so does understanding and reporting on its impact. “Collective action is teamwork at its highest order,” she said.

That creates an interesting challenge for measurement. Much of our funding infrastructure is designed to measure individual outcomes: this grant funded this activity, which produced this result. But when multiple organisations are working together to shift a large and complex system, isolating impact in that way becomes much harder – and perhaps misses the point. Collective action requires a bigger and longer-term view of what success looks like.

And not everything meaningful needs to be expressed through a hard metric. Minderoo Foundation’s Kristen Stevenson reminded us that sometimes stories are evidence too.

Of course, collective action isn’t automatically the right approach to every problem, nor is it easy. Kristen acknowledged there remains an important place for organisations acting independently. But where collective action is needed, trust becomes essential – and that means being honest when things don’t work. Expectations about how quickly change will happen need to be realistic, roles need to be clear (and allowed to evolve), and an intention to collaborate needs to be backed by a genuine commitment to working and measuring together.

Interestingly, Grant suggested that much of this collaboration already happens naturally on the ground. It can be further up the organisational chain where egos, brands and competing priorities get in the way. “We’re here to solve the biggest problems in the world – not build our brands and logos,” he said.

Perhaps that’s collective action at its best – not diminishing the contribution of any one organisation but amplifying what becomes possible when many work towards the same goal.

Better questions, bigger possibilities

There was a lot to take in across the Summit, but looking back, a few themes kept surfacing: be brave enough to try something different; measure what matters without letting measurement become the work; listen to and trust the people closest to the problem; tell the stories that bring impact to life; and recognise when the problem is simply too big to tackle alone.

Perhaps most of all, I came away thinking about the sense of possibility that comes from bringing people together who genuinely believe things can be better – and are prepared to do something about it. I said at the beginning that the Summit felt a little like being part of a movement. After two days hearing from people challenging accepted ways of doing things, building unlikely partnerships, sharing power and asking bigger questions about what impact could look like, that feeling had only grown stronger.

There are no easy answers to the problems our sector is trying to solve. But there are an awful lot of clever, committed and courageous people willing to keep asking better questions – and to work together on what comes next. That feels like a pretty good place to start.

You can register your interest for Global Impact Summit 2027 here. There are some fantastic learning and professional development opportunities coming up with F&P too – the Big4 Fundraising conference in November 2026 (Major Gifts, Grants, Gifts in Wills and Corporate Partnerships – Melbourne) and, in 2027, the F&P AI Summit and F&P Digi.Raise (digital fundraising) – find out more here.