Özlem and I were in Singapore for AT ONE Impact Week 2026 (September 8–12), five days convened by TPC and NO.17 Foundation around a single, deceptively simple question: what if love became infrastructure? Not love as sentiment, but love built into how capital is allocated, how landscapes are stewarded, and how the next generation of leaders is equipped.
My intention in stepping into Impact Week was to support people in awakening to their sacred dream, and to encourage them to walk in its direction. I've come to believe that when a person lives into their purpose, they remember that they are a guardian of life. The outer work of this week — capital, oceans, family systems, all of it — rests on that inner remembering. The invitation is to turn inward, to do our own work, and from there to lead by example — holding one another in a basket of love, without judgment, as each of us walks our own path. Impact Week, exploring love as infrastructure, felt like the right place to speak this prayer out loud. Love gives us the courage to build relationship. We begin by building a new relationship with ourselves, which then ripples outward into new relationship with each other and with our planet.
The week itself moved deliberately from I, to we, to all of life. Each day carried its own question: how do we live with each other, how do we build the infrastructure for that life, and what do we carry forward.
Specifically, I was there:
🔹 To speak in three rooms — on land and belonging, on family capital and inherited mandates, and on the inner work beneath all the outer work.
🔹 As an FBN Impact Leader, deepening the multi-capital conversation and the question of how business families move towards collaboration and co-creation.
🔹 Wearing my Turquoise Coast Fund hat, learning how family capital can serve the ocean — from community-led conservation to materials innovation and youth education — toward collaborations in the Mediterranean and at COP31 in Turkey.
What If Love Became Infrastructure
The week opened around how we live with each other. Minister Grace Fu, Al Gore, the World Economic Forum's Sebastian Buckup, and TPC Chairman Fred Tsao set the tone, with Al Gore making the case that if love truly guided our decisions, we would build a different, better kind of economy.
What stayed with me from the plenary was where every thread kept landing. The systems we spent the week discussing — oceans, cities, capital, food, education — all share a single point in common: the human at the center of them. As one panelist put it, inner work is itself a kind of infrastructure, an operating system for every other impact you hope to have. Fred Tsao offered a small practice I've carried since: when something makes you uncomfortable, find out why, and become comfortable with it. Consciousness shifts there. Another panelist named the quieter truth beneath all the strategy — that small individual acts, repeated at scale, are not too small to matter. They are the mechanism.
Holding the Threshold
The first room I spoke in, hosted by Melanie Ryan of Unearthodox, was framed around four capacities for leading through uncertainty: love, grief, imagination, and belonging. When I first read the session description, the word that reached for me was belonging.
I shared a story from early in my career, during a CSR project conserving sea turtles on the Turkish Mediterranean coast. In the second year, one of the locals told me you don't become a local by buying land or a house in a neighborhood — you become a local once you serve it. He told me he now considered me one. I still carry the effect of that welcome. It shifted my whole relationship to place, from ownership to stewardship. When Özlem and I acquired our farm last year, a week before Impact Week, we approached it the same way: we spoke our own dream for the land first, then began paying attention to the dream of the land itself, and looked for how the two could be woven together. We named the land Starseed in the winter moons. Listening to Sarah from the Philippines speak of her ancestral land, I realized it is not that we represent the land — it is the land speaking through us.
Mandate Redesign
The second room, moderated by Alexis, gathered families reinventing inherited mandates alongside voices from UNCTAD and the GIIN. Every generation has to reinvent the family business; the challenge is taking that mandate, transforming it, and carrying it on.
I shared what I've come to call reverse legacy. Years ago, sitting on our multi-family office board and thinking about what I would leave my three sons, I watched them build the things I did at work out of LEGO bricks. I realized the legacy is not the business or the assets handed down — it is this present moment, my choices right now. Instead of letting the burden of the past inform the present, I let the world my children will grow into inform the choices I make today. That reframing came with urgency: the assets will not matter much in ten years if I do not act fully now. It is why I moved to build Light Eagle, why we write an intentional letter for every investment, and why we invite other families to join rather than asking a large group to agree. And I have learned that no family, however capable, moves a system alone. We are now forming new constellations — most recently a fund with six other families. The unit isn't the family anymore. It's the constellation.
The Work Before the Work
The most personal room, held by Britta, asked each of us to tell the story of our inner work as a Pixar-style arc.
Once there was a young man who was president of his university, went to work at a bank, then moved into the family business. Every day he climbed the ladder and checked every box, and yet something felt missing — and no one else seemed to notice, so he kept quiet. Until one day, in a coaching session, he was asked what he was seeking. He answered, simply: magic. His coach turned out to be a trained council guide, and that answer opened a training journey that has lasted over a decade — a remembering of why he chose to come into this lifetime, and of who he really is. Later, when a participant asked how to find the courage to step onto their true path, I offered what I have learned: if there is a path we are here to walk, it keeps showing up until we take it. Each time, it helps us grow the courage the adventure requires. You don't inherit your inner work. It begins the day you admit something is missing and name what you are really looking for.
Families Collaborating for the Ocean
One of the richest rooms of the week was a three-hour working session convened by the FBN Impact Community, designed by Jenaan with Filippo, on how families can collaborate for the ocean. We opened by going around the circle, each of us naming our first ocean — for me, the Aegean, an arm of the Mediterranean. What made the room unusual was who was in it: family offices, philanthropists, marine scientists, conservationists, ocean-fund managers, and a voice from the IMF, different layers of the capital stack actually listening to one another. As I said near the end, it is rare to sit where these stakeholders are in the same room; positions that first sound contradictory turn out to be different faces of the same puzzle, and once you can see the whole, you feel empowered rather than stuck.
Catherine, who leads ocean philanthropy at Luma Foundation, grounded us in community-led conservation. She named the uncomfortable truth that the guardians are not the ones getting funded — less than 1% of relevant finance reaches indigenous peoples and local communities, though they steward some 36% of key biodiversity areas. She walked us through a managed-access site in Indonesia where fishers collect their own data, run a savings-and-loans club, and, unprompted, chose to direct part of their community fund toward conservation. Their chant stayed with me: if the sea is full, there will be more fish, and more to share. Andrew added a distinction I keep returning to — between substantive rights and the procedural ones that quietly block communities from being heard.
The conversation kept circling one gap: how to get the business voice to the table, not just the philanthropic and conservation ones. TPC offered a live example, describing how Fred Tsao can move fluidly between speaking of love and speaking to a fisheries minister in the language of economic impact — and how a conservation-led national park concession can be backed by a viable business model without conservation losing the lead. I found myself thinking about my own work at Turquoise Coast Fund, which supports grassroots projects conserving the Mediterranean as part of a network of some twenty local conservation funds worldwide. We have a strong touch with the ground; my open question, the steep and welcome learning curve of this week, is how to connect those very local projects upward into the impact capital stack. Plugging families into larger systems, rather than gathering families only among themselves, is where the real leverage lives.
Parley, Materials, and the Next Generation
Between sessions, the ocean thread continued in conversation. I sat with Cyril from Parley for the Oceans, who is assembling a coalition of brands around natural and biofabricated materials at aggressive scale — starting with abaca, a banana-plant fiber. We found two clear places to work together: material innovation, beginning with an introduction to SunText, whose research is well advanced; and youth education, through Parley's Ocean Uprise, helping the next generation of families fall in love with the sea and learn to change the companies they will one day inherit. We spoke of convening around COP, weaving in the sustainability committees of FBN Turkey and TÜSİAD and our own fund partners.
I also met Casey, whose team of tech-driven natural capital developers uses AI and satellite imagery to assess land for carbon eligibility — compressing a six-week expert process into thirty seconds. As a NatureRe investor now in our fifth year, with our first Colombian credits emerging, I recognized the shared frustration: off-takers who want to be first in line yet delay buying as long as they can. The carbon market is being pushed toward commodification, but it is not behaving like a commodity. These are the questions I keep watching, and the relationships I want to keep tending.
Conclusion: From I, to We, to All of Life
Impact Week asked one question and spent five days turning it into practice. What I carry home is that love as infrastructure is not a metaphor. It is a build.
Three rooms and one ocean circle, one thread. Belonging is earned by serving, not bought. Legacy is the present made well, carried by constellations rather than lone families. Guardianship of the sea flows to communities only when we fix the procedures, not just the funding. And none of the outer work holds unless the inner work is underway. Al Gore was right that love guiding our decisions would build a better economy — but the plenary's deeper insight was that every system we are trying to repair runs on the same substrate: the human at its center, and the consciousness from which we act.
The week closed with a wave of new partnerships and commitments — from FBN and NO.17's move to accelerate business families from ownership to stewardship, to the building of an Asia Ocean Fund. It was never meant to be a single event. It was the beginning of a movement, and it continues in the work each of us carries forward. The invitation is the one I came with: turn inward, walk toward your sacred dream, and hold one another in a basket of love as we each do our own work. That is where the world begins to change, one person, one dream, one step.
