SILP Learning Festival 2026
The SILP Learning Festival returns with an invitation to pause.
At a time of shrinking budgets, polarisation and eroding trust in institutions, many of us are being asked to deliver certainty in systems defined by complexity. Funding structures are under pressure. Climate narratives are contested. Intermediaries are navigating tensions between accountability and learning, urgency and reflection.
Rather than rushing to clearer answers, this festival creates space for deeper questions. Across two online sessions, practitioners, funders and systems leaders will explore how stories, funding practices and relational work shape what becomes possible in climate and social transformation.
Day 1: Climate narratives in action
Attention, trust and imagining alternative futures
Tuesday 10 March | 10:00–12:30 CET
Climate stories travel through Hollywood, through policy papers, through local communities and across social media feeds. But which narratives are capturing attention and which are building trust?
Day 1 explores how storytelling shapes public imagination, political will and institutional behaviour. We will reflect on the inherited narratives we carry, how they influence our work, and what responsibility we hold in shaping new ones.
In a world where trust in media and institutions is fragile, how do we communicate climate action with integrity, complexity and credibility?
Day 2: In-between Spaces
Intermediaries rethinking funding practices
Wednesday 11 March | 10:00–12:30 CET
Many organisations operate in the “in-between spaces” translating between funders, institutions and communities with differing incentives, timelines and definitions of success.
Day 2 focuses on the lived experience of intermediaries navigating uncertainty, power dynamics and competing accountabilities. What does it mean to hold relationships that don’t neatly align? How can trust-based approaches shift not only what is delivered, but how we work together?
This session builds on insights from SILP’s trust-based funding experimentation and reflects on what has been learned about relational accountability, learning in real time and working without predefined certainty.
Why this festival, now?
The Systems Innovation Learning Partnership (SILP), funded by Climate KIC and Sida, was designed as a live experiment in trust-based funding and collective learning.
Over the past year, seven organisations have tested what becomes possible when funding systems are structured around relationships, learning and shared responsibility rather than control and compliance.
The Learning Festival brings those reflections into conversation with a wider community of funders, practitioners and systems leaders.
This is not a showcase.
It is a space for honest dialogue.
A space to question the stories shaping our systems.
To examine the tensions we are navigating and to consider how trust, learning and more human ways of working might help us move forward.
Who should attend?
Funders, intermediaries, practitioners, communications leads, policymakers and anyone working at the intersection of climate action, systems change and institutional transformation.
If you are working in complexity this conversation is for you.
