The conversation began with a question about money itself.
What is it for? Who does it serve? And what happens when the instrument we are trying to use to fund social change is – by its own internal logic – oriented toward something else entirely (spoiler alert, capital accumulation by a few and not equitable or regenerative outcomes)?
That was the provocation that opened our convening at Commons Hub Brussels, hosted with characteristic warmth and generosity by Leen Schelfhout. And it turned out to be a good starting place for our exploration.
Why Brussels? Why May 2026?
EdelGive/SIX is part of the Social Innovation Mission Facility – a European consortium working to explore how social innovation can be more effectively sourced, encouraged and financed within the framework of EU Missions. Those Missions – climate adaptation, cancer prevention, soil health, ocean restoration, climate-neutral cities – require both technical innovation, and social innovation. The social innovation that builds trust, shifts behaviour, coordinates systems, and enables communities to adopt new approaches over the long term.
Social innovation rarely fits a conventional funding model. It tends to be relational, place-based, and slow to mature. It generates public value rather than private enterprise value. And yet we keep asking it to prove itself on terms designed for something different.
The question we brought to Brussels was simple to state and hard to answer: can we redesign the capital stack so it actually fits the work?
The panel
Three practitioners brought the conversation to life, each from a distinct vantage point.
Anne Snick opened by asking us to do something most finance conversations rarely do: look at the money system itself. She offered the image of money as a pharmakon – the Greek word for a substance that can be either medicine or poison, depending on how it is used. When money flows toward what serves us, it is generative, medicinal. When the accumulation of money becomes the goal itself, it can turn into poison. Her provocation was direct: is it possible to fund social change using instruments structurally oriented toward extraction? Do we have to innovate the money system, not just the products within it?
Luisa Bernardes from Portugal Social Innovation brought the practitioner’s view – including the honest account of what hasn’t worked. Portugal has built a rich portfolio of financing instruments: capacity building, grant-based partnerships, social impact bonds. What remains missing, she argued, is an equity-like instrument for projects that deserve patient co-investment – a model that treats the funder as a genuine patient investor willing to co-create value. Despite a few attempts, they’ve not yet designed a financial instrument that institutions want to be part of, that works over the longer term and with concessional or below market returns.
Pieter-Jan Van de Velde from Trividend and the European Catalytic Impact Investing Fund II offered what might be the sharpest structural analysis of the evening. He described a capital market with a conspicuous gap: enormous amounts of capital at the philanthropic end (minus 100% financial return in finance language) and interest if there are market-rate return expectations of +15% – but almost nothing in between. The organisations doing the most important mission-critical work often sit precisely in that gap, the -100% to +15% space. They create real value. They just cannot capture it in ways the current system recognises. His challenge to governments was pointed: stop requiring private sector matching as a condition of public investment. That mechanism grows the market without broadening it. It finances what the market already wants to finance, rather than what the market cannot reach.
The audience brought the conversation further still. Where are the citizens in all of this? What does it mean that we call communities “beneficiaries” when they are the ones doing the work? How do democratic accountability pressures make long-horizon thinking structurally difficult for governments? And can we design participatory mechanisms – local citizens’ assemblies, peer-led funding pools – that give communities genuine influence over where money flows?
A reflection from beyond the room
Amir Rizwan had been due to join the panel. A last-minute conflict prevented him from attending – but his thinking arrived ahead of him, and it deserves its own space here, because it shifted the frame of the entire conversation.
Amir’s argument was not that we need more money. Globally, there is no shortage of liquidity. The issue is whether capital is structured around the actual work of mission adoption and societal transition.
He named what he sees as the central structural gap: we ask mission-enabling organisations to behave like investable businesses before the ecosystem around them has made that possible. They are expected to evidence demand, de-risk adoption, and show revenue pathways – while simultaneously doing the civic and relational work that markets rarely reward directly. That double burden is not a design flaw that patient capital alone can fix. It reflects something deeper: the assumptions of mainstream finance – growth, liquidity, institutional risk, return expectations – have been imported wholesale into social investment, even when the organisations receiving that investment are doing something fundamentally different.
Drawing on Mariana Mazzucato’s argument that public institutions must shape and co-create markets rather than simply correct market failures, and on Carlota Perez’s work on how major societal transitions require institutional redesign alongside innovation, Amir pushed toward a more structural ask. The question is not only “how do we deploy capital more ethically?” It is “what would it mean to redistribute influence over capital, ownership, learning, and institutional direction?”
If he had been in the room, that question would have taken the conversation somewhere even more uncomfortable. We intend to go there in the upcoming labs we are planning as part of this project.
What we are still sitting with
Several tensions from Brussels do not yet have resolution, and we are not going to pretend they do.
The pharmakon tension. Anne Snick’s framing invites us to interrogate the money system at a level most finance conversations do not reach. But the people trying to fund social innovation cannot simply wait for the money system to transform itself. What is the relationship between working within existing instruments and advocating for new ones – and where does pragmatism tip into complicity?
The SIB debate. Social impact bonds provoked real disagreement. For some in the room they represent a useful mechanism for bringing private capital into public problem-solving. For others, they privatise the risk of innovation, require near-certainty of outcomes before investment, and reproduce the very dynamic they claim to disrupt. We do not think this is settled. It deserves a proper lab of its own.
The “simplify or innovate” dilemma. One honest observation from the room: social innovators are already bamboozled by the complexity of existing finance. Adding new instruments risks making things worse, not better. But as Pieter-Jan noted, simplification often means homogenisation – and homogenisation tends to squeeze out the innovators who most need something different. What does well-designed complexity look like, and who bears the translation cost?
The citizen question. Several voices noted that funders, investors, and policymakers were doing all the talking. Communities and citizens were largely absent from the room and, more importantly, from the instruments being designed. If participatory governance correlates with mission-aligned investment – which emerging research suggests – then this is not a values point. It is a design principle.
What comes next – and an invitation
This convening was the opening move, not the conclusion. Over the coming years, EdelGive/SIX will be facilitating three labs and a roundtable as part of this network’s ongoing work, each designed to go deeper into a specific aspect of how patient capital can be integrated into the capital stack alongside philanthropic, public, and market-rate finance.
We are actively looking for funders, impact investors, foundation professionals, and social innovation practitioners who want to be part of this work – not as observers, but as co-designers. The labs are designed for people who are genuinely grappling with these questions in their own practice and are willing to bring that honestly into the room.
If Brussels taught us anything, it is that the field does not lack intelligence or goodwill. What it sometimes lacks is the space and structure to work through the hard questions without rushing to resolution. That is what we are trying to create.
If you would like to be involved, get in touch: sojung.rim@socialinnovationexchange.org
And if you were in Brussels and want to continue the conversation – or if you were not in Brussels but recognise your own questions in what you have read here – we would love to hear from you.
With thanks to Anne Snick, Luisa Bernardes, Pieter-Jan Van de Velde, Amir Rizwan, Leen Schelfhout and Commons Hub Brussels, and everyone who brought their thinking to the room.
