SPOTLIGHT
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Planting Seeds of Systemic Change
Reflections from Forum for the Future and the School of System Change
In February 2025, Forum for the Future and the School of System Change brought together three self-selected Net Zero Living Pathfinder Places for an immersive training day on systemic practices and approaches.
The goal
- Help participants understand and articulate their contributions to systemic transformation
- Equip them to sustain momentum beyond the end of their current funding cycles.
Working with a small group, we enabled deep reflection, coaching, and honest dialogue. The participants openly explored their challenges, what change looked like in their local contexts, and began to articulate their impact in precise, powerful terms.
Rather than falling back on claims of “accelerating change,” participants named the specific roles they played in their local area, such as “matchmaking”, “convening”, “coordination”, “knowledge translation”. By naming these contributions, they gained clarity about their influence and a strong foundation for storytelling, strategy, and legacy planning.
The activity
We introduced the Multi-Level Perspective (MLP) framework to help participants diagnose system dynamics.
This surfaced common challenges:
- financial flows constrained by complex contracting,
- funding cycles too short to support trust-building, and;
- grant structures that stifled innovation.
Participants spoke candidly about the personal effects of these challenges, and the importance of creating space to learn, adapt, and experiment without fear of failure.
We took this opportunity to look beyond abstract data points and tell the story of the tangible changes happening on the ground.
- One participant shared how a local couple, supported by the project, finally managed to heat their home affordably.
- Others described how repeated convening shifted community mindsets, from receiving help to offering it.
These stories reaffirmed our belief that systemic change begins with relationships, trust, and sharing lived experiences.
We invited participants to consider the legacy they wanted to leave after their projects finished.
They offered “gifts” to their places: documented engagement methodologies, frameworks for collaboration and real-world evidence of impact. These aren’t copy & paste solutions to net zero, but projects that are rooted in local place, adapted throughout the process and open to evolution and shared learning.
What we learned
This training affirmed the approach that Forum and the School of System Change take to supporting change makers. Smaller focused group conversations allow for depth, not scale, which unlocks insight and builds confidence.
At Forum for the Future and the School of System Change, we believe that systemic change takes more than tools and frameworks. It takes space and time to reflect, language to articulate invisible work, and funding structures that support the messy, relational nature of transformation. We look forward to continuing to support changemakers on their path to long-term, place-based impact.