Özlem and I were at Katapult Future Fest in Ruigoord, on the edge of Amsterdam (May 27–30, 2026). My intention was to find out what happens when the impact community stops gathering in its own rooms and steps, at scale, into a festival — to listen for where capital, consciousness, and collaboration begin to move together.
Specifically, I was focused on:
🔹 Following the systemic investing thread — where the conversation around impact capital is going as it tries to move from transactional to systemic.
🔹 Holding a session on Esoteric Investing with Adela — exploring what becomes possible when we align our work, including how we invest, with the truth of who we are.
🔹 Moving as a team with Özlem, splitting across tracks so we could cover more ground and trade what we each learned.
🔹 Sensing the container itself — whether a festival, with its tracks, its rituals, and its land, could hold a community through a genuine shift rather than another round of panels.
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Why a festival, and why now
There is a fair critique of gatherings like this — that they can become beautiful bubbles, comfortable and self-congratulatory, while the world outside asks for action. I take that seriously, and so did the festival itself.
This was the 8th edition of Katapult Future Fest, but the first time the impact community came together here at this scale. The whole thing was framed as an experiment: can a community that usually meets in binary, transactional configurations — investor and founder, funder and grantee, buyer and seller — practice something more systemic together? Not a conference about systems change, but a few days lived as a system.
The theme was metamorphosis. And the festival took that word seriously, all the way down to its biology.
This is my report on how the threads unfolded.
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The Village That Held Us
Before any program began, we were welcomed into the story of where we stood. Ruigoord was once an island, then reclaimed land, then a village the municipality emptied in the 1970s to build an industrial harbor. The oil crisis stalled the plan, and into the ghost village came artists and dreamers who squatted the empty houses and built a community around communal art and ecology. Fifty years on, it is a legalized village of "total works of art," recently granted another 25 years — a place that holds, in its own words, money as a means and not a purpose.
What moved me was how alive the village's philosophy still is. They speak of the playful human, of seasonal celebrations and full moons, of the year as a wheel rather than a line — a moment to sow, a moment to harvest, a moment to peel away what is no longer needed, like an onion, and enter the cycle clean again. They told us about the law of entrainment: two clocks set near each other will, in time, tick as one. Thirty metronomes started at different rhythms will, within a minute, beat together.
It was the perfect ground for what we'd come to do. We were thirty metronomes — or five hundred — set down near one another, about to find a shared rhythm.
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What Is Your Catapult?
Thursday morning · Investing for Systems Change
Charly Kleissner opened by naming the cracks — in our democracies, our social cohesion, our deep desire for peace — and the disturbance many of us feel watching them widen. Then he turned the lens on us. Our agenda, he said, is to enable humanity to live in harmony with nature again, to step into our responsibility to the planet. Are we ready to step in? His own answer was no — not yet — because we are still in our bubbles. The impact-investing world is a small, colorful, comfortable bubble inside the vast system of finance. Fragmented. Speaking a language the wider world doesn't understand. Largely invisible.
But in turbulence, he reminded us, openings appear. What if everyone became an impact investor — not only with financial capital, but with cultural, spiritual, every kind of capital they could bring to the table? The movement would become huge, loud, messy, and finally impactful enough to help the system heal.
Then he pointed at the catapult standing on the festival grounds — a machine built to shoot things, even people, from one place to another — and asked the question that set the tone for my whole week: What is your catapult? His, he said, was language and storytelling. Mine, I suspect, is the practice of weaving purpose into everything — of refusing to leave the soul outside the room where capital is decided.
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Imaginal Cells
Thursday · The Arc
Metamorphosis is not a metaphor the festival wore lightly. When a caterpillar dissolves inside the chrysalis, new cells — imaginal cells — begin to activate. At first the caterpillar's body treats them as a threat. But they keep appearing, keep finding each other, keep multiplying, until what was a caterpillar reorganizes into a butterfly. The cells don't fight the old body. They simply become coherent enough to become something new.
That image stayed with me as I moved through the five tracks the festival was built around: Culture, Creativity & Consciousness; Deep Tech & Humanity; Investing for Systems Change; Ocean & Nature; and Regenerative & Bioregional Futures. Five fields of inquiry, each its own current, all running through the same village.
I found myself thinking of everyone there as an imaginal cell — each of us a small signal of a future trying to organize itself, often unrecognized, sometimes treated as a threat by the systems we come from, but increasingly able to find one another. Over three days, you could feel the cells linking up.
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Two Tracks, One Team
Thursday-Friday · Investing for Systems Change · Regenerative & Bioregional Futures
Özlem and I worked the festival as a team. She followed the bioregional weaving track; I followed systemic investing. In between sessions we traded notes — what she was hearing about land, place, and regeneration, what I was hearing about how capital does and doesn't move — and we let the two threads braid. Now and then we dropped together into the consciousness track, where the questions underneath both of our tracks were waiting: who is the investor, who is the steward, and what is the inner state from which we act?
There is something I've learned again and again: the most useful thing two people can do at a gathering like this is divide and reconverge. Cover more ground, then sit down and weave it. The map you build together is always larger than the one either of you could walk alone.
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Esoteric Investing
Thursday · Culture, Creativity & Consciousness · Investing for Systems Change
The session I held with Adela was called Esoteric Investing, and we opened it the way you have to open a room like that — with the honest disclaimer that this is not investment advice, and that we came not as gurus but as peers practicing something most finance rooms leave at the door.
I spoke into my own practice: weaving life purpose into everything I do, including how I invest. We explored money as energy — something that can be shaped, directed, perceived — and the idea that the one who holds the capital matters as much as the tool itself. A knife can spread butter or do harm; the difference is the hand. So much of responsible deployment, I've come to believe, begins with inner change long before it reaches a term sheet.
What made the session alive was the room. We asked people what had drawn them to a session with that title, and listened for the patterns. What surfaced was a quiet hunger — among investors, founders, and stewards — to stop splitting the analytical from the intuitive, the masculine from the feminine, the spreadsheet from the soul. To invest, in other words, from the truth of who they are. We didn't resolve it. We practiced it together for an hour, which felt like the point.
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Five Hundred at the Table
Thursday evening · The Spaces Between
One evening, the festival did something I've never seen at this scale. Five hundred of us were sent out, in groups of eight to ten, to be hosted for dinner in the homes of local participants — around real tables, in real kitchens, with people we'd just met.
It undid something. A festival of five hundred should feel like a crowd; instead it became a hundred small circles, each one intimate enough to actually hear each other. Scale, made personal. It was the law of entrainment again, played out over dinner — strangers' rhythms quietly syncing, the way the village had told us they would. I left my table that night convinced that the most systemic thing a gathering can do is make itself small enough for trust.
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Into the Fire, Toward the Future
Friday · The Arc · The Spaces Between
We closed as a community by completing the arc. Each of us wrote, on a piece of wood, what we were ready to let go of — the old body of the caterpillar, the part of the structure we no longer needed to carry. And then we gave it to the fire, launched from the catapult that had stood over the whole festival as its namesake and its question.
Then we planted seeds for the future and catapulted those, too — toward what wants to grow. The metamorphosis the theme had promised wasn't only on the stages or in the language. We had moved through it together: dissolved a little, found each other as imaginal cells, and reorganized toward something we couldn't have become alone.
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Conclusion: The Choosing Ones
What I carried home from Ruigoord was a single sentence, spoken into the gathering and lodged in me since: we are not the chosen ones — we are the choosing ones.
It reframes everything. There is no anointment coming, no permission to wait for, no guarantee that the metamorphosis completes. There is only the choice — made and remade — to keep activating as an imaginal cell, to keep finding the others, to keep bringing the full depth of who we are into the rooms where the future is decided.
Charly asked what our catapult is. The village taught us that rhythms entrain when they're set down close to one another. The festival showed us that five hundred people can become a hundred kitchen tables, and that a community can write its grief onto wood, give it to fire, and plant seeds in the same breath. And the theme insisted, gently and biologically, that transformation is not something that happens to us — it is something a critical mass of us chooses, together, until the old form has no choice but to become new.
So the question I'm leaving with is not whether the impact community will escape its bubble. It's the one the festival kept handing back to each of us:
What are we choosing?
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With Özlem, Adela, and a thousand fellow travelers — Ruigoord, May 2026.
