Today’s session featured a rich dialogue with three expert panellists: Isabelle Bart, Jeremy Epstein, and Jon Schull. Each brought distinctive insight grounded in lived experience, technical expertise, and sustained commitment to regenerating systems—ecological, economic, and relational.

Isabelle Bart opened the conversation by reflecting on her experience mentoring impact-driven founders across the United States, Europe, and emerging markets. Many founders, she noted, do not initially identify as social entrepreneurs. In her experience, it is only after navigating operational and funding challenges that they articulate a mission-driven identity. She spoke frankly about the competitive nature of funding environments, especially for ventures that straddle for-profit and nonprofit models. For those without clear business fundamentals, she suggested, mission alone is not enough. Isabelle also urged accelerators and support programmes to pay greater attention to the personal journey of founders. Entrepreneurship, she said, is psychologically demanding. More support is needed to help founders sustain their own wellbeing over time.

Jeremy Epstein shared practical insights from his work at Open Forest Protocol, a decentralised registry for nature-based carbon projects. He explained how existing verification systems—such as those run by Verra and Gold Standard—are often prohibitively expensive for small-scale or community-led initiatives. Jeremy outlined Open Forest Protocol’s alternative approach, which enables free project registration and verification by a distributed network of over 40 independent organisations. This decentralised structure allows for more culturally grounded and locally informed perspectives. Jeremy spoke of restoration as a source of livelihood and argued that decentralised infrastructure makes it possible for “the forest itself” to generate income, providing a scalable and transparent model for financing regeneration.

Jon Schull connected these themes through the lens of narrative and community-building. Drawing on his experience founding e-NABLE—a global network that produces open-source 3D-printed prosthetics—he highlighted the importance of emotionally resonant stories that bring people into action. Now working with the EcoRestoration Alliance, he called for a shift away from carbon tunnel vision and towards holistic ecosystem thinking. He described restoration as planetary cooling—“like installing air conditioners that run on sunlight and purify the air”—and challenged participants to communicate the value of restoration in human terms, not just technical metrics.

Participants brought their own reflections into the mix. Fidel reflected on the implementation gap that emerges when project design is disconnected from those responsible for delivery, leading to delays despite funding. Anastasiia echoed Isabelle’s point about the psychological burden of entrepreneurship and stressed the importance of mental health and pacing oneself. Evan explored the idea that most people do not resonate with data or analysis alone, and that visualisation, metaphor, and aesthetic experience are often more effective at building conviction. He encouraged participants to move beyond cognitive advocacy and explore how multisensory storytelling could expand the emotional bandwidth of the movement.

The discussion raised fundamental questions. What does it take to translate vision into infrastructure? How do we cultivate systems that reward ecological contribution rather than extraction? And how can restoration efforts be designed not only to repair ecosystems, but to reweave social and economic fabrics in place?

There were no easy answers, but the session surfaced tested practices and field-level innovations that suggest new possibilities. The most resonant insight may have been this: transformation travels not just through data, but through story, through structure, and through shared effort grounded in care.