Highlights, Takeaways, and Inspiration for Action
From October 27 to 29, 2025, downtown San Francisco hosted one of the most significant annual gatherings of impact leaders, investors, entrepreneurs, and changemakers. United by a shared mission — to connect capital with solutions to the world’s biggest social and environmental challenges — SOCAP25 participants focused on collaborating for systemic change and moving impact from niche to mainstream.
With 100 speakers and 80+ interactive sessions across five tracks, the event challenged attendees to think bigger and engage deeply and openly with one another. The time spent together — sharing, learning, and envisioning a brighter future — positions our community to carry forward our incredible work long after the conference ends.
We’ve compiled several key takeaways from SOCAP25, highlighting some of the standout moments and impactful lessons that were shared. Read on for meaningful insights that you can apply to your work. And don’t just take our word for it: You can find more takeaways from our community on our LinkedIn page and learn from what’s been shared under #SOCAP25.
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SOCAP25 Takeaways: Monday, Capital Connections Day
The first day of SOCAP25 marked the debut of Capital Connections Day, a redesigned format to kick off the event with intentional relationship-building for powerful collaborations. During the Opening Ceremony, a select group of impact leaders, including Vanessa Roanhorse, Jim Sorenson, and Edgar Villanueva, delivered powerful calls to action to the audience, setting the tone for the three-day conference. Interactive sessions throughout the day invited attendees to work together, share experiences, and leave with new contacts to amplify their impact. We were blown away by the conversations — both on and off stage — that took place across campus.
What we heard from the stages:
- “We need more capital that is risk-willing, willing to experiment with different business models — and we need it now. There’s a pressing need to demonstrate what successful alternatives look like in the market.” Camille Canon, JS Capital and Purpose | Solve-It! Unlocking $10B for Responsible Tech
- “Collaborative capital is the key to the future.” Dario Parziale, Toniic | From Capital to Collaboration: A Gathering for Catalytic Investors
- “The biggest way to mitigate risk is transparency. … You have to be able to arm your advocates with the knowledge they need to overcome the ‘no’s.’” Omar Blayton, Sunwealth Power | Be a Funding Magnet: How Mission-Aligned Partners Catalyze Mainstream Investment
- “Having ownership is not enough. You have to be treated like an owner and you have to feel like an owner. And until you’re treated like an owner and you feel like an owner, you’re not going to start acting like an owner.” Todd Leverette, Apis & Heritage Capital Partners | Expanding Ownership, Expanding Opportunity
SOCAP25 Takeaways: Tuesday
The second day of SOCAP25 began with opening sessions for each of the event’s five content tracks: The Future of Global Finance, Catalytic Capital 2.0, Climate & Nature-Based Solutions, Place-Based & Community Impact, and Justice & Economic Prosperity for All. Members of the SOCAP25 Content Curation Councils offered a high-level view of the current landscape and introduced the topics that shaped each track’s sessions. In the panels and workshops that followed, participants collaborated to identify what is needed to spark innovation, launch lasting collaborations, and deepen solutions-oriented relationships. The community’s resilience inspired us.
What we heard from the stages:
- “Who knows better how to steward a place than the people who know that place, the people who call that place beloved?” Michelle Lee, The BioFi Project | Place-Based & Community Impact: The Track’s Opening Panel
- “The biggest competitor to climate action and investment is paralysis. It’s not about perfect action, it’s about taking action.” Kate Williams, 1% for the Planet | Climate & Nature-Based Solutions: The Track’s Opening Panel
- “It’s really important to have an ecosystem that’s working together and fosters conversations to meet the needs of providers and the businesses. … I think there’s a lot of room for partnerships across sectors to crowd capital into this impact asset class.” Diane Kolar Leach, JPMorganChase | Expanding the Capital Continuum for All Businesses
- “If you can prove that the work of the social impact team is directly feeding commercial drivers of the organization through the talent pipeline, that ROI piece really makes a difference in the conversation.” Sam Hyams, Springpod | The AI Generation: A High-Impact Opportunity for Investors
- “We work in systemic investing: creating the conditions for money to move in right relationship with place, people, and purpose. We want finance to behave more like a living ecosystem and less like a mechanical pipeline.” Keoni Lee, Hawaii Investment Ready | Decolonizing Investment: Centering Indigenous-Led Solutions in Impact Finance
- “Nature’s intangible benefits — beauty, spirituality, well-being — can lead to both human benefits and financial profit.” Nalini Nadkarni, Sorenson Impact Institute | Valuing the Priceless: Unlocking New Investment Through Nature’s Intangible Benefits
- “What does it mean to hold governance and hold community in shared power? For us, a lot of that has been in the art space … artists investing in artists and community investing in community. We’re putting those dollars to work to keep them in communities, especially black and brown communities, longer.” Adriana Abizadeh-Barbour, Kensington Corridor Trust | Local Futures: Investing in Artists & Culture for Community Health
- “There’s so much value that we are adding to help create the impact that we all want to see. Essentially, what we’re seeing is the cost of creating impact. Who’s going to cover that cost?” Brigit Helms, Miller Center for Global Impact | Hitting the Reset Button: Unlocking the Next Era of Impact Investing
SOCAP25 Takeaways: Wednesday
The final day of SOCAP25 reminded attendees that the work doesn’t end here — this is where it starts. We left the event re-energized to go back to our daily reality and face the growing challenges around us.
What we heard from the stages:
- “It’s frustrating that people feel they can’t come out as impact investors. Claim it. There’s nothing wrong with loving our society, taking care of our planet, and caring for each other.” Stephen DeBerry, BRONZE | AI Can’t Save Us—But Impact Might: Lessons from SOCAP, Eastside, and the Future of Investing
- “We sometimes forget that our money is the vote that we take every day—everything that we buy, everything that we invest in. When we do that collectively and we do it loudly, we are able to shift culture and politics. … Everything that we’re mad about that the administration is defunding, we can fund.” Morgan Simon, Candide Group | Surviving 4 More Years: Protecting and Advancing Impact
- “We need to shift from being talkers and bullshitters to being builders. We need to start putting pipes in the ground and start building, and not stop until we have put every piece of infrastructure in place that our communities need to be safe.” Aina Abiodun, VertueLab | Surviving 4 More Years: Protecting and Advancing Impact
- “The challenges in our communities are enormous, but the willingness and determination for change is threefold that. There is so much opportunity to amplify and scale the grassroots work these communities are already doing. … Why now? Because we’re so late already.” Marie-Josée Parent, Raven Indigenous Outcomes Funds | The Indigenous Economy and Its Competitive Advantages — Ready for Scale, Ready to Lead
- “Housing and health are inextricably linked. … We’re not waiting years to see data on how we’re moving the dial. We’re measuring it in real-time and sharing the results with our investors. It forms the foundation of a true partnership with aligned incentives, measurable outcomes, and capital being put to work to improve health on multiple levels.” Nina Tschinkel, Catalyst Opportunity Funds | Impact Investing as Good Medicine: Prescribing Capital for Healthier Communities
- “One of the powers of employee ownership and the alignment of incentives that it creates is that we also are re-weaving our social fabric.” Melissa Hoover, Apis & Heritage Capital Partners | The Ownership Revolution: Workers, Wealth and the Future of Business
- “Collaboration isn’t just a strategy, it’s actually a responsibility. In mission-based work, one institution isn’t going to achieve our shared goals and impact … it is a shared responsibility we have across organizations.” Richard Tate, The California Wellness Foundation | Place-Based Investing for Inclusive Communities: From Local Lessons to Global Applications
- “Make the business case. The science is evolving that makes outcomes-based financing more attractive to investors … Investing in Nature-based Solutions is actually a very good business decision.” Catherine Burns, The Nature Conservancy | Expanding the Nature-based Solutions Toolkit: Using Innovative Financial Models to Drive Scale
- “There has been a general assumption that innovation goes one way, from the West to the South. … What made it easier for us to bring capital from the South to the West was thinking about how we have built the experience and the talent, which flipped the conversation from the capital to a focus on having the right profile and personality to take on the challenge.” Gregory Rockson, mPharma | Financing Innovation Across Borders
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Thank you to our values-aligned partners who helped bring SOCAP25 to life. Through our collaboration, we can dream bigger, uplift our community, and amplify the solutions we all need to build a brighter tomorrow.
Sarah Sterling has over 10 years of experience working with entrepreneurs, accelerators, investors, and nonprofit organizations on ecosystem building, impact measurement, leadership and organizational management, and fundraising. She’s a natural networker who thrives on connecting organizations for catalytic action and impact and has developed an international network of social entrepreneurs, impact investment funds, major philanthropic organizations, and impact conveners.
She has been with SOCAP Global for over 10 years, first serving as the Executive Director of Entrepreneurship, managing the Fellowship Program, and supporting capital connections between entrepreneurs and funders. In her role as the Executive Director of Programming and Convening, she has helped to guide and lead the development and management of content at SOCAP.
Photos by Hardwig Media.
