20–22 May 2026, LUMA Arles, co-hosted with InTent
For three days in late May, a global circle of business families gathered in the South of France around a single inquiry: how can families help accelerate biodiversity restoration while building resilient economic systems? Co-hosted by FBN Impact and InTent at LUMA Arles, the Impact Action Days drew families from twenty-nine countries into four parallel tracks: biodiversity, food systems, decent work, and accelerating impact.
What follows are reflections from the Biodiversity & Nature Restoration track. The thread underneath them all: trust, mapped and held with care, is the infrastructure that lets capital flow toward life.
I. A field converging on what it has been missing
Four years into FBN Impact's arc, the diagnostic conversation has matured. The opening day surfaced a pattern that is now becoming impossible to ignore: across very different vocabularies, the same gap is being named.
Some called it the infrastructure problem, that there is no Goldman Sachs for nature. Others called it the valley of death between philanthropy and impact, or the piloting-to-scale gap. Some named it as cadence, that the velocity of family-office impact transactions has fallen, not risen, even as the urgency has sharpened. Others named it as vehicle structuring, or as the absence of shared diligence and trusted dealflow.
Six vocabularies. One missing layer.
What sits underneath all of them is the same connective tissue: the means by which trust between families becomes coordinated action without anyone losing sovereignty. The field has been circling this question for years. In Arles, it began (quietly, then explicitly) to name it together.
II. From talking about cooking to cooking
The most generative shift across the three days was the move from describing the problem to feeling the absence of action. By the afternoon of day one, the conversation had moved from diagnosis to a question with sharper edges: if we said we were going to cook dinner together, we would be moving, we would be chopping. How do we move with that feeling among this group?
That question reframed the rest of the gathering. Day two opened in a different register: less storming, more forming. The room began to build, in real time, the mechanisms it had been describing.
III. Three mechanisms, three stewards
By the close of day three, the Biodiversity track had converged on three workstreams. Each is member-led, supported and amplified by FBN Impact but not owned by it. Each has a steward who has publicly committed to carrying it forward.
Mapping our multi-capitals. An inventory of the financial, social, political, and symbolic resources the community holds, so that none of our collective capital stays invisible or unused. The first action is a discovery call to design the mapping together. This workstream is being led by Catalina Mojica of Casa Tibaná.
Member-led impact safaris. Intimate, in-place visits to fellow members' impact initiatives, designed to learn deeply, to support the host project tangibly, and to grow the practice through hosts inviting hosts. The first safari will take place in the Western Ghats of India, hosted by Sophie Sirtaine, where landscape-scale restoration, watershed ecology, and women-led groups are converging in a living lab for regional regeneration.
Peer impact investing collaboration. A space for families to share knowledge, diligence, and trusted dealflow. Explicitly not a fund, not a solicitation, but a community of practice in which capital moves more efficiently because relationships already exist.
In the days following Arles, more than seventy members stepped forward to carry these three workstreams.
IV. The thread
What Arles confirmed is the convergence of a field that has been quietly preparing itself for some time. The three workstreams the room arrived at are not three separate ideas. They are three layers of a single architecture: map what we hold, gather in trust around it, deploy capital where the gathering reveals fit.
For Light Eagle, this is the architecture our mandate names: invest, co-create, and build toward a future through systemic collaboration, multi-capital thinking, and new governance models that empower all families. Arles was a moment in which a wider circle arrived at the same architecture in its own language, and chose first actions accordingly.
There is something to be said for what this means about the moment we are in. The field is no longer waiting to be persuaded. It is waiting to be helped to build.
If you feel called to learn more about, or join, any of these workstreams, please reach out.
