Experience Positive Impact and Practical Solutions Firsthand at SOCAP26 in Chicago
At a time when decisive global action is needed, SOCAP26 will convene a community of thought leaders from across the impact ecosystem with a mandate to move capital toward practical, scalable solutions. For the first time in the event’s history, we will host this flagship event in Chicago, strengthening our ability to connect more audiences and build a larger and even more inclusive platform.
Developed alongside our partners, Content Curation Councils, Advisors on Indigenous-Led Content, SOCAP Open session organizers, and input from our community, the SOCAP26 programming focuses on unlocking new pathways for capital deployment, aligning investment and policy with inclusive economic models, accelerating funding for climate action, strengthening the infrastructure that enables broad participation, and advancing place-based strategies rooted in community priorities.
SOCAP26 is designed to catalyze action.
This includes the weeks leading up to the in-person conference, when each track will launch with a virtual opening webinar. These live virtual panels — available only to SOCAP26 ticket holders — feature a deep dive into the state of the field by distinguished leaders from across sectors and around the world. The panels also give participants a head start on the event, building shared context and network connections before SOCAP26 begins, allowing more time for deeper conversations and collaborative problem-solving on-site.
Below, learn more about what’s happening at SOCAP26 in Chicago, Oct. 12 – 14, and how the event is facilitating hands-on learning and solution-sharing from peers and leaders across sectors — and secure your ticket to take advantage of all SOCAP26 has to offer!
On-Location: Solutions at Work
For the first time in SOCAP’s history, we’re taking our global community beyond the conference venue and directly into the neighborhoods, organizations, and innovation hubs shaping the future of impact in Chicago. On the first day of SOCAP26, Monday, October 12, attendees will have the opportunity to participate in Chicago Community Sessions, immersive, on-location programming designed to connect the ideas and conversations of SOCAP with the people, places, and projects putting them into practice. Participants will experience impact not as a theory discussed on stage, but as tangible, place-based work happening in real time alongside the practitioners building it. Explore all of the Chicago Community Sessions.
The Chicago Community Sessions will be followed by Opening Remarks, honoring Indigenous Peoples’ Day and grounding our time together in reflection, respect, and relationship. We will begin with a Land Acknowledgment, followed by a fireside conversation moderated by John Palfrey, President of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, with members of the MacArthur Foundation’s Native Self-Determination Program. These conversations will carry through the entire conference — challenging us to rethink systems, expand opportunity, and build an economy that works for all people and planet. Opening Day closes with a Welcome Party to set the stage for the ideas, partnerships, and collective action, and provide space for attendees to build new relationships, reconnect with colleagues, and spark conversations that will continue throughout the conference.
Peer Learning Opportunities: Solutions in Practice
This year, SOCAP offers multiple opportunities to engage directly with peers or participate in showcases that highlight solutions in practice, including:
- Capital Provider Experience: This curated programming within the SOCAP agenda is designed specifically for the individuals and organizations making decisions about where and how capital is deployed — LPs, GPs, investors, family offices, foundations, and other capital allocators. The experience goes beyond traditional panels or networking sessions, offering real insight into where the market is moving, who’s leading with credibility, and how solutions are being structured and implemented in practice. Sessions within this experience are scheduled throughout the event, tagged in the agenda as part of the Capital Provider Experience.
- Cross-Regional Networking for Collective Impact: This interactive, facilitated networking session brings together impact leaders from across regions to build meaningful relationships, exchange ideas, and identify opportunities for collaboration.
- Founder Showcase: Women Entrepreneurs Driving Change: Attendees will hear from the women impact entrepreneurs from the Cartier Women’s Initiative community who are building solutions that will shape our collective future. From climate and carbon removal to healthcare, inclusion, sanitation, and sustainable technology, these founders are leveraging business as a force for good. Learn more about the entrepreneurs.
- Beyond the Pitch: The Entrepreneurs Building What’s Next: Bringing together social entrepreneurs supported by the Rustandy Center for Social Sector Innovation at the Chicago Booth School of Business and the MacArthur Foundation, this dynamic showcase that goes deeper than the traditional startup pitch. Through short pitches, rapid-fire questions, and candid conversations, entrepreneurs will share not only what they are building, but what comes after the pitch: the realities of entrepreneurship, lessons learned, barriers to growth, and the capital, partnerships, and support they need to move forward. Learn more about the entrepreneurs.
- Capital on Community Terms: What Does It Take?: Community members are building businesses, expanding arts and culture, and working to own real estate assets in their community, but current capital structures often overlook these emerging models. This session will be led by members of the Community Desk Chicago SOCAP26 Fellowship Cohort to explore how patient capital can support innovative economic development models in neighborhoods that build wealth through ownership, stabilize communities, and provide opportunities to scale small businesses.
- Banking on Communities: How Mission-Driven Financial Institutions Are Expanding Access to Capital CDFI Showcase: Mission-driven financial institutions are reaching entrepreneurs, families, and communities often overlooked by traditional finance. Leaders from CDFIs, credit unions, and community banks will share how flexible, relationship-based financing is expanding access to capital and creating pathways to long-term economic opportunity.
Leaders Taking Action: Practical Solutions at Scale
The SOCAP26 agenda is designed to catalyze action in our community, which is uniquely poised to move capital toward practical, scalable solutions. This year’s tracks are intentionally built to reduce friction, unlock sidelined resources, and accelerate deployment across sectors. Below, preview examples of sessions within each track.
Cross-Over Track
- Brief & Bold: Lightning Talks for Solutions-Driven Impact: In these short, TED Talk-style presentations, speakers will present collaborative initiatives that can mobilize capital for real-world, scalable outcomes. Reflecting on SOCAP26’s emphasis on practical innovation — and drawing inspiration from its new home in Chicago — the examples shared will highlight models that are both scalable and grounded in the real economy.
A Future That Works for Everyone
- Crowdsourcing the Next $1B Opportunity in the Care Economy: This workshop explores where the care economy remains underserved and where innovation is beginning to emerge across care segments. Facilitators will guide participants through hands-on exercises to surface unmet needs, highlight bright spots of innovation, and collaboratively imagine potential solutions with the scale to matter.
- Openly Gray: A First-of-Its-Kind Roadmap for Investing in the Longevity Economy: Global aging will reshape every economy, yet impact investing still lacks the shared taxonomy, benchmarks, and capital strategy needed to address it. This interactive session will introduce the Aging Investing Roadmap, a practical framework for treating aging as a distinct impact investing asset class, and ask participants to help refine the Roadmap together.
Climate Capital
- Indigenous-Led Financial Solidarity: Powering a Just Energy Future for Tribal Nations: This panel will explore how Indigenous-led financial intermediaries, fund managers and allied funders are collaborating to develop innovative financing for energy transition projects in U.S. Tribal communities. Speakers will discuss their collective efforts to challenge the status quo and ensure essential funding remains available for systems-changing, community-led initiatives.
- Beyond Pilots: Investing in Climate-Resilient Agriculture: Across Africa, governments, farmers, and investors are confronting uneven fertilizer access, high input costs, climate stress, and geopolitical shocks that continue to disrupt food systems. Rwanda is pioneering a new approach, moving beyond research and pilots toward practical, scalable approaches to soil restoration.
Pathways to Shared Prosperity
- $326 Billion in Patient Capital: Why It Isn’t Reaching Patient Model: Donor-advised funds hold $326 billion in U.S. charitable assets, nearly double what they held in 2020. Yet only 27% of investors who already put sustainable investments in their personal portfolios use philanthropic assets for impact investing. This session traces that exact gap, from a $326B pool of idle patient capital, through the intermediaries who could route it, to a real example of what it could fund.
- Beyond the Deal: Making Housing Investment Repeatable & Scalable: This session asks, how do we intervene before housing affordability becomes structurally difficult and increasingly expensive to reverse? We have enough transaction history, institutional infrastructure, and outside investment to know individual interventions can work. The harder question is what makes those successes repeatable, scalable, and investable across different communities and market conditions.
Shaping Capital Systems
- From Deposits to Impact: Unlocking Community Wealth Through Cash: What if the most overlooked tool for community impact is sitting in a bank account? This interactive session explores the role of impact deposits in advancing community wealth, economic opportunity, and place-based investment
- Barriers to Scaling Impact – How Allocators, Operators & Intermediaries Work Together: Scaling impact requires better alignment among allocators, operators, and intermediaries. This session will explore this challenge and then break into groups to solve five key aspects of aligning capital with impact.
Value of Culture & Place
- From Philanthropy to Market-Rate: Leveraging the Full Capital Stack for Thriving Communities: What can corporate investors unlock when they deploy the full capital stack — philanthropy, impact finance, and market-rate capital — toward shared place-based outcomes? This panel will explore how coordinated investment across capital types can expand affordable housing, strengthen small businesses, and support thriving communities, using Chicago as a case study to illustrate strategies that can inform and scale place-based efforts nationwide.
- Investing in the Midwest: Building a Stronger Regional Capital Ecosystem: The Midwest is emerging as a dynamic hub for impact investing, entrepreneurship, and economic growth, yet significant gaps in capital access remain. This conversation will bring together investors and ecosystem leaders to examine the region’s capital landscape, highlight promising investment opportunities, and explore how collaboration can unlock greater impact across Midwestern communities.
- Place-Based Investing in Practice: How Community Foundations Drive Community Thriving: Participants will explore how community foundations, as place-based investors, will leverage multiple forms of capital to strengthen local coalitions and advance community thriving. Participants will examine practical examples of deploying financial, social, and civic capital in underserved communities, gain insights into challenges and successes, and identify strategies they can adapt in their own regions to foster equitable, long-term community impact.
