The 30-second version: 30+ practitioners, 14 live conversations, September 1st through December 1st, built around what the cohort itself asked for most in the realm of impact innovation: moving systems, using AI responsibly, and leading with more self-awareness under pressure. Register by August 31 with code IMPACT for USD 100 off. Keep reading for who’s actually in the room, or scroll straight to the bottom to register.
If you’ve been following Field Notes from Costa Rica, you know how this started: a hypothesis, multiple Fellows, five days on a campus in Costa Rica, and a bet that systemic design, applied AI, conscious leadership, and peace & conflict analysis actually belong in the same container. That bet continues on Tuesday, in the Virtual Edge Sessions — and this week we want to properly introduce you to who’s joining us around the fire. If it’s your first time reading anything by The Impact Innovation Course, it may be helpful to know that we are hosted by the UPEACE Centre for Executive Education at the University for Peace, established by the UN General Assembly.
How this season is actually built
A few things worth knowing before you look at the lineup, because we want to explain why it’s shaped the way it is. Think podcast energy, TED-style moments of wisdom, with ‘around the fireside’ vibes — not a lecture series. Every session has more than one conversational partner in the room, and you’re invited in too, not just watching. This is why we are also partnering with KoLab and the Gatherings Studio for both tech and experience design elements. This is not your COVID ad hoc sit and get webinar series. We ambition to take ecosystem weaving and relationship building seriously, and this is why design is a big part of what we have been focused on for the past several months.
This season didn’t start with a wishlist of names, either. It started with 127 intake responses across the Costa Rica and Virtual Track cohorts, analysing both the applications, registration and diagnostic data of our fellows and participants. We also built backward from what people actually asked for- and mixed that in with what we felt worthy of investing time and scope into - the edge. The ‘world of worlds’ that are emerging rapidly among various contexts. The core intent however is to connect ideas, hearts, and inspire action for positive contribution. We all have a role to play. So what did we discover in the analysis? Systemic design came back as the single biggest learning priority, ahead of everything else, which is why it gets its own full workshop in the foundation rather than getting folded into a panel. Close behind: leverage points and moving from theory to practice, responsible and ethical AI (including when not to use it), authenticity and values-grounded decision-making, and regenerative finance.
The arc itself moves in three deliberate stages: a shared foundation first, then outward into how systems, capital, technology, and narrative actually shape the world, and finally inward and forward, toward wisdom, embodiment, peace, and each person’s own next chapter. We like to think of it more like a journey, with multiple threads.
(Speakers below are confirmed as of this week and, as always, subject to change based on availability and feedback)
Part One: The Foundation
The season opens with the same core faculty who held the room in Costa Rica, now teaching their own disciplines in full.
September 8 — Workshop: Applied AI: Practical, Responsible, Human-Centered
Kaz McGrath (Founder & CEO, PLAI) opens Applied AI with the same whether / when / for whom thinking that ran through the Costa Rica week - agentic workflows that actually save time, and the judgment calls that matter more than the tools.
September 15 — Workshop: Conscious Leadership: Leading from the Inside Out
Laila Jewayni (Founder, Laila Sahar) leads Conscious Leadership, closing the gap between the leader you know is possible and how you actually show up under pressure - the deepest question the cohort’s own intake data named.
September 22 — Workshop: Systemic Design: Seeing and Shifting Systems
Praewa Satutum (Associate Director, Stanford University) closes the foundation on with Systemic Design: mapping complexity where stakeholders, institutions, and incentives collide, and building the shared toolbox the rest of the season draws on.
Part Two: Systems in the World
September 29 — Pluriverse Futures: Foresight for a Fractured World
Four people who anticipate for a living, and disagree productively about how it should be done. Aarathi Krishnan built RAKSHA Intelligence Futures on the premise that structural breaks in the global order are detectable six to eighteen months before anyone sees them coming. Prateeksha Singh built the Lotus framework for equity-driven foresight and has spent years documenting futures methods from around the world that were never tagged “foresight,” often because they weren’t written in English. Michell Zappa has run Envisioning as open technology-horizon research since 2010, and is now tracking how AI agents are reshaping organizations from the inside. Ollie Bream McIntosh may be the most rigorous AI skeptic on this entire roster: someone who believes in AI’s potential and deliberately set that belief aside to interrogate it properly, in public, across a whole research series. Whose futures count, and who gets to build them?
October 6 — AI, Power and the Public Good
Benjamin Kumpf leads innovation and digital transformation at the OECD, where the live question isn’t whether AI pilots work, it’s how to move past them into actual systems. Nick Martin, CEO of TechChange and a UPEACE alumnus himself, is currently writing publicly about where AI philanthropy money is actually going, while shipping his own AI-built tools weekly. Anne Makena runs Research Alpha and has spent this year arguing that Africa’s deep-tech boom needs time, talent and treasure, not just capital. Three vantage points on the same question: who has power in the AI transition, and who gets left out.
October 13 — Reimagining Capitalism: Systemic Finance and Regenerative Philanthropy
Marya Hill-Popper Besharov is Professor of Organisations, and Impact and Academic Director of the Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship at Said Business School, University of Oxford — and empirically studies when purpose actually survives contact with profit inside hybrid organizations. Felicity Tan is building a newly scaled UK foundation from the ground up on trust-based, relational philanthropy rather than transaction. Lucas Matarazzo is building the data and intelligence layer for systemic investing out of São Paulo, channeling capital into regenerative transitions across Latin America. Less a debate about whether capital should change, more an honest account of what breaks when you actually try and where the practical opportunities and use cases can be found.
October 20 — Indigenous Wisdom, Imagination and Relational Design
This one might be the most quietly radical session of the season. Parul Punjabi Jagdish co-steward the global AIME movement, fifty-plus countries, built on imagination and custodianship, and in 2023 led the writing of a death date into AIME’s own constitution: 2032, a deliberate act of institutional composting, an ending treated as stewardship rather than failure. Mert Cetinkaya has been active in building the field of Relational Design, the idea that the process of building a strategy is itself the intervention. Michelle Chakkalackal works as an executive coach and organizational facilitator, holding space for teams navigating tension and power dynamics as they move through change, trained in organisational constellations. Three people who’ve each contributed meaningfully to places and platforms.
October 27 — Regenerative Business and the Case for Beauty
Tim Leberecht co-founded the House of Beautiful Business ten years ago and just closed a thousand-person gathering in Athens, and he’s unusually candid about what it actually costs to run something on meaning instead of efficiency. Amit Paul‘s World of Wisdom podcast just passed 300 episodes, a curiosity-driven show on wisdom, learning, and the personal and systemic implications of the transition. Rebecca Henderson, one of roughly twenty-five University Professors at Harvard, wrote the book on reimagining capitalism, and her most recent work has moved from the corporate case toward something closer to collective reweaving. Beauty and romance in work, argued as strategy, not softness.
November 3 — Narrative Power: Storytelling for Climate and Change
Facts don’t move systems; stories do, and this panel has the receipts. Maya Lilly, from the Emmy-winning team behind Years of Living Dangerously, has deliberately inverted the standard Hollywood model, asking what a community needs in its climate fight before deciding what to film. Weenarin Lulitanonda managed Thailand’s international reserves through the 1997 Asian financial crisis before co-founding the Thailand Clean Air Network, turning an invisible pollutant into a national rights question and then into an actual citizen-drafted Clean Air Bill still being fought over in parliament. Max Lilley rounds out the panel from the brand and narrative-strategy side.
November 10 — Weaving Ecosystems: Inclusive Economies in Action
Simon Baldwin has built place-based regenerative economies twice, on two continents, for SecondMuse, which makes the question of what didn’t transfer between them as instructive as what did. Sakson Rouypirom spent thirteen years running SATI Foundation for Bangkok’s most marginalized young people before deciding the real leverage was upstream, in ethical recruitment and supply chains, which is what Issa Solutions does now. Adel Ramdani somehow does both at once: deploying serious institutional capital in climate philanthropy while also chairing a steady-state economy organization that questions growth itself. Systems change, all three would say, is a team sport.
Part Three: Inner Work and Integration
November 17 — Work That Matters: Purpose, Vocation and the Road Ahead
A deliberately intimate closing pair. Roshan Paul built the largest talent-development organisation for the social sector based in the Global South from scratch, co-authored the Amazon #1 bestseller The New Reason to Work, and has spent years arguing that philanthropy has systematically underfunded the one thing every other outcome depends on: people, not projects. Michelle Geraldo de Araujo, a Brazilian regenerative futures strategist, former UN Global Compact Board, curated a TV series on regenerative solutions launched during COP30. She leads a global advisory practice on Conscious Transitions Intelligence and founded The Aura Project, integrating consciousness into leaders and businesses development.
November 24 — The Inner Edge: Embodiment, Equanimity and Peace
Our closing thematic session, carrying the course’s peace and conflict thread inward. Sophie Rucker works at the seam between how a story is told and how it’s held in the body, as a communications strategist and somatic counsellor. Jordan Hussein coaches founders and senior tech leaders through funding rounds and market turbulence, with a focus on nervous-system regulation under genuine pressure. Paramita Mentari Kesuma has spent two decades weaving sustainability leadership through Indonesia’s changemaker networks, across government, the UN, and industry. And Upekkha Yan Liu, a writer and meditation teacher whose chosen name is, fittingly, the Pali word for equanimity, closes the loop on what this session is really asking. Outer peace, all four would tell you, begins with inner capacity.
December 1 — Closing Fire: Integration, Celebration and Commitments
A hosts-led close, no external speakers, dedicated entirely to integration, celebration, and seeding the alumni ecosystem that carries past November.
The team holding the fire
Behind every session is a small team making sure the space itself works as well as the content does.
Courtney Savie Lawrence leads and initiated the course as a whole, a global senior innovation advisor to the United Nations, co-lead of C3 Labs and the Oxford Climate Tech Initiative, co-founder of Bangkok’s Circular Design Lab, and, fittingly, a UPEACE alumna herself, having earned her own Master’s here as a Rotary Scholar. Stephanie Arrowsmith holds the Virtual Track’s experience end to end, an Impact Hub co-founder and board member drawing on a decade building community and systems-thinking programs across Southeast Asia. Akash Bhalerao and Natalie Ortiz Villalobos weave the ecosystem between sessions: Akash bringing fifteen-plus years of systems-change strategy work with Ashoka and beyond, having supported over 150 organisation leaders directly; Natalie bringing regenerative design and embodied facilitation rooted in her home country of Costa Rica, by way of yoga, breathwork, and doula work. And Irina Panovich, is on faculty as a strategic innovation designer who treats most hard problems as coordination problems, and builds the connective tissue accordingly.
Two studios make it run. KoLab powers the technology behind the season, and Gatherings Studio powers the experience design, the fireside format itself. And a particular thank-you to PLAI, Kaz McGrath’s company, for strategic support across the whole season, well beyond her own Applied AI workshop.
The season at a glance
Details, details!
Every session runs live on Zoom and KoLab, on Tuesdays, mostly at 16:00 CET (a handful shift for speaker availability, always current on the portal and in the table below), in the same 90-minute shape:
0:00–0:30 — The Fireside Roundtable. Moderated, electric conversation with that week’s speakers, hosted live. (For a workshop, up to 45 minutes goes to the material itself, with the remaining 15 for open conversation.)
0:30–1:00 — Open Conversation. The floor opens to you: questions, reflections, live dialogue with the speakers.
1:00 — Formal close of the structured session with the speakers.
1:00–1:30 — The Open Fireside. Optional. Stay and join the fire for ecosystem weaving and organic conversation, facilitated by the faculty co-hosts and fellows.
Every speaker also answers the same anchor question in their introduction, deliberately open-ended: what’s your current edge? And if you’re on the certificate track, you’ll submit a “question at the edge” before each session, so the conversation gets shaped by the room, not just the panel.
Join us!
Not for a webinar series. It’s ninety minutes of live, unscripted conversation with people who are actually doing the work, every Tuesday, followed by a fireside where you bring your own questions into the room. Fourteen sessions, recordings included if you miss one, certificate and audit pathways depending on what you need.
Register by August 31 with referral code IMPACT and save USD 100. The fire starts Tuesday.
The Impact Innovation Course is hosted by the UPEACE Centre for Executive Education at the University for Peace, established by the UN General Assembly.