Global Impact Summit · Sydney · August 2026
Selected highlights from the Global Impact Summit
And believe me, it was hard to choose.
Global Impact Summit · Sydney · August 2026
And believe me, it was hard to choose.
Congratulations to the movers and shakers who brought this brilliantly curated Summit to life.
Thank you also to everyone I talked with in sessions, in the coffee queue, on the walk between venues, in the bathroom where we were both hiding away for a quiet moment (lol). It was a pleasure to meet so many people with big hearts, generous spirits and a fire in their belly for a better world.
On artificial intelligence
AI opens millions more doors, and the human heart still does the deciding on which ones to open. This was an idea that framed both days, and showed us that a big part of what’s changing is how many of those decisions can actually be acted on, and at what pace.
Some examples were genomic analysis pointing children’s cancer treatment away from chemotherapy and towards more targeted therapies, frontline workers arriving at a call already across someone’s full story, leaving them more prepared and able to offer a better service and support, and predictive modelling in social and community services that helps to intervene early to mitigate risk, without becoming deterministic. And underneath all of it, the unglamorous floor — bringing the tools an organisation already owns into one place is hugely productive before anyone even needs to say the words agentic AI, or even needs to know what it means. We can make a big difference with a small amount of this technology.
We’re still in the chaotic middle of AI adoption. The sediment will always be there — the pain, the risk, the dark side — but hope and opportunity will outweigh it.
Mike Gore, Founder & CEO, Charitabl. and the Global Impact Summit — sharing an analogy about capturing shimmering creek water in a jar
Going in with our eyes open matters just as much. We need to understand that ‘cognitive offloading’ cuts both ways. Handing the grunt work to a machine frees an experienced person to spend their attention on judgement, creativity and other parts of the work that carry more impact. The same move, made by a child or young person who has not yet built the underlying skill, removes the practice that would have built it.
Doug Taylor, chief executive of The Smith Family, reported the organisation saving around 86% of the time spent on case notes. He also described a trial of an AI tutor, aimed at motivation and engagement for students who need extra support. The resolution offered from the Microsoft side was that the positive case depends entirely on whether the foundations are already there.
Trust, compliance and governance should always come first. Nakshathra Suresh’s session, You Can’t Build Impact on Unsafe Systems, made the case that most harm comes from everyday decisions about what gets prioritised and who gets designed for — and that once a system scales, the harm scales with it.
Big social and technological change widens the existing gaps. People with disability, rural and remote communities, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities, and other marginalised groups, as well as small organisations. Skills and access have to arrive faster than the disruption does.
Being replaced feels terrible; being extended feels limitless; the same tool can create two entirely different experiences. OpenAI reported seeing about eight times more usage from ‘Power Users’ than from mid-range users.
Solutions to the world’s increasingly complex problems are embarrassingly simple.
Tony Rinaudo AM, Principal Climate Action Advisor, World Vision Australia — For The Love Of Future Generations
Transactions funding trees
Change the outcome of behaviour that already exists, rather than the behaviour. This is the premise and move underneath Green Pay; money is already flowing through supply chains and transactions, so redirecting one piece of that flow creates a funding source for nature without asking a single member of the public to act differently.
The point is that the solutions already exist — it’s the funding that doesn’t, and that’s the gap Green Pay is built to close. The Biodiversity Council of Australia is calling for 1% of the federal budget to be invested in protecting and restoring nature — roughly a dollar in every hundred the government spends. Current investment sits at about a tenth of that, with $649 million spent on biodiversity programs in 2024–25. We know what to do. The money just isn’t there yet.
We default to the default because we are too busy to look up. Banking is boring to most people, value often collapses into an interest rate, and moving money somewhere better is important rather than urgent — which is exactly why it rarely happens.
Let’s all set ourselves a challenge. Thirty minutes, choose five things to examine and tick off your list to move to more ethical options. Banking, superannuation, the systems you pay for in your business. There is no perfect individual action, and no systems change happens without individual action.
Collectivisation as a key influence lever. Customer owned and member owned organisations are the vehicles for it — divestment that gets counted, and therefore heard. Real change needs action from both government and industry, and this is one of the few things that reaches both at once.
Follow the Money — Glenn Bartlett, Green Pay; Alex Andrews, Vow; Rob Quadara, Bank Australia; Ben Peacock, Republic of Everyone.
On the harder conversationsIn order to enact genuine and lasting systemic change, we need to be willing to have the conversations that have historically been taboo or uncomfortable to reckon with, because if we can’t talk about them, we certainly can’t act to change them.
The Summit made space for these conversations and platformed the changemakers and advocates leading the way — racism discussed openly from the main stage, panels working through racial injustice and what racial equity actually asks of us, and menstrual health and menstrual justice treated as the serious funding gap they are.
But nothing gets funded that nobody will say out loud, and representation and intersectional leadership can’t be retrofitted to impact work — they need to be part of the foundation of it.
On telling the story
If you’re planning on telling your personal story to the media, first ask what you’re hoping to get out of it, and whether media is the best way, or even a way, of getting it. Odette Barry of Odette & Co named event activations as an alternative example to consider, and Bridget Northeast of The Imperfects described the due diligence her team runs for guests — holding care for the guest, the audience and her own team at the same time.
If media does approach you, there are three roles available: the data and the facts, the expertise/system knowledge, or the lived experience. Deciding which one before the conversation can help to protect everybody in it, and your own proximity to the trauma in your story should be carefully considered in that decision.
Lived experience is a powerful driver for change. Guy Sebastian, in conversation with Mike Gore about why he started The Sebastian Foundation, put it that the empathy well deepens through pain — you don’t want anyone else going through what you went through. With a painful experience or experiences underneath a great deal of lived experience advocacy, it’s worth asking some key questions when you’re deciding when, where and how you’re going to share your story.
From consultation to leadership. The session on redesigning prison systems put it most sharply — what changes when the people most affected stop being treated as participants and start being the designers. That holds for designing programs, and it holds for who sits around the board table.
Just Governance are doing exactly that. They put young women, gender-diverse people and people with lived experience into boardrooms, treating lived experience as a form of expertise rather than a diversity add-on. The energy from that team was infectious. Introduce yourself to these young women — they’re going to change the world.
Inclusion should not come with an invoice.
Sharin Milner, Founder, Split the Profit — on the children who would benefit most from sport being the ones who cannot access it
On persevering
FAIL: first attempt in learning. The reframe came from one of the young speakers in A World I See, and it’s one that many of us need to be reminded of at times — keep persevering; impact does not arrive on the first attempt, which makes a willingness to fail part of the method.
Seeing the courage and unbridled optimism of the young people leading the charge for the change they want to see filled my heart with so much joy and hope. Nedd Brockmann’s version of the same idea, from Radical Innovation for Impossible Problems, hosted by Gill Whelan of GILL WHELAN Projects: trying at all costs is far greater than winning at all costs.
Kindness is my superpower, and it’s free.
One of the four student speakers — A World I See, presented in partnership with Microsoft Elevate
Risk has been undersold. We’ve been risk averse for so long that moving toward it — where there’s a commensurate payoff — is often the thing that gets attention and lets us try something genuinely new.
‘Maturity’ is sometimes fear dressed up in a suit. Don’t mistake cynicism for wisdom, and don’t mistake kindness for naivety.
Healthy social ecosystems aren’t someone else’s problem. Any one of us is one unexpected step away from needing the support systems we’ve worked so hard to create for other people. Invest in people and you’re investing in the conditions you may one day need yourself.
Wellbeing is key for sustainable impact. Understanding your own biology and energy, and what actually keeps you well, is one of the most generous things you can do for yourself and the people around you.
So, what now?Tom Allen of Impact Boom left us with three questions. Simple enough to do something about without much friction, but powerful in the possibilities they can open.
Success is personal. Generosity multiplies. Success ends with us, but legacy begins with generosity.
Tom Allen, Founder & CEO, Impact Boom
Embrace childlike wonder. Milly Bannister of ALLKND and her invitation: hold onto that wonder as we imagine the future, and extend our curiosity into what we each need to do in order to get there.
Ask who you need to become, not what to do next. The future gets built by ordinary people, in the right conditions, who choose to become the people the world needs.
Great leadership is creating the right conditions for others to flourish. Said about what actually lies beneath the surface of healthy, long-standing organisations.
Anita Sood anchored For The Love Of Technology on three words — love, listen, learn. If love is about opening the door, listening is about seeing the whole person as they come through it.
What matters most isn’t what we’ve built, but who we’re building it for — so how can we build a better future for the people we love the most?
Anita Sood, Asia Commercial Operating Unit Lead, Microsoft Elevate
An activation of a washing line strung with letters, each addressed to a stranger by their situation. We were invited to write a letter to a stranger and take the one we needed.
“To the thinker…”
Hey friend. Does it feel like you are deep in your head? Overthinking everything? Asking lots of questions? Questioning everything? Does it feel lonely, isolating, draining, demoralising, exhausting? Well I just wanted to tell you that you are not the only one feeling this way, and I hope you feel the love around you.
