Conversation Café: Investing Beyond Impact

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Exploring practical pathways to long-term resilience in the Lower Mainland region

Have you ever seen an investment make real progress — and still watched the larger system stay stuck? That gap is what we're gathering to explore.

Why this moment matters

The impact investing field has made genuine progress. And yet many of us are noticing that project-based funding — even when it works — rarely shifts the larger system. This convening is a space to sit with that tension together, and explore what comes next. This is an open, peer conversation — not a presentation, not a pitch. Everyone in the room can ask questions, and every perspective helps.

What to expect

Laura Melly will open with a practitioner's reflection on her own journey from traditional impact investing toward a more systemic lens — the questions it raised, the tensions it surfaced, and what changed when capital began engaging with complex, living systems.

Founders Melanie Carlone and Marianne Wyne of ThePivot.Earth will then share an emerging Systemic Food Resilience initiative in the Lower Mainland — a real-world example of what it looks like when capital, relationships, and place come together. This work is early and still taking shape, and the perspectives in the room are genuinely part of how it develops.

From there, we move into small-group conversations to surface what systemic investing actually needs — what real impact looks like, and how we measure success when capital works at a systems level.

You'll leave with:

• A clear understanding of systemic investing and why it moves beyond transactional approaches
• A new way to see, talk about, and make decisions in your own practice
• A real-world look at how one regional initiative is putting these principles into practice — and a chance to help shape what comes next

What matters most is how you think, not what you already know. 

Hosted by All Purpose Creative, located at 402 West Pender.

Curated by https://thepivot.earth/system-transformation . 

Thanks to Genus Capital Management for their support of the Impact for Breakfast Vancouver Chapter.