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Pollinate Impact empowers and resources impact incubators across the Global South to collectively amplify our ability to solve the biggest problems facing people and the planet.

18/09/2026

The pitch went well. The investor is interested. And then… the deal stalls.

Fundable and funded are not quite the same thing.

At the Global Pollinate Potluck, How ESO’s can close investor readiness gaps within their portfolios, co-created with the William Davidson Institute, gets into that frustrating last mile - from unit economics and valuation logic to term sheets and data-room hygiene.

And we’re making it practical. Participants will choose an enterprise from their own portfolio and sketch out a 12-week investor-readiness sprint to take back with them.

Getting ventures ready for the pitch matters.
Getting them ready for what comes after it matters even more.

📍 October 7 | Manila
🎟️ We're getting really close to the Potluck; get your tickets here: https://www.pollinateimpact.org/events/global-potluck-2026/potluck2026_agenda/?tec-tab=2

17/09/2026

The road to the Global Pollinate Potluck 2026 has already begun. 🇵🇭🍲

Earlier this month, our Community Choreographer, Ruod Ariete, joined the brilliant community at Impact Happy Hours in Manila - hosted by Villgro Philippines and xchange PH, alongside makesense Asia, The Spark Project and PhilDev Foundation.

And it felt like a rather fitting place to start.

Impact Happy Hours has been bringing the Philippine social impact community together for years to share what they’re working on, what they’re wrestling with, and what they might be able to do together.

Which sounds pretty familiar. 👀

Ruod came with a question we’ve been asking a lot at Pollinate: Why are so many of us solving the same problems separately?

Someone in Nairobi is wrestling with something that someone in Makati is wrestling with too. Someone in Ha Noi may have tested something that could help an organisation in Bangalore. But those lessons only travel when we create spaces for people to actually find one another.

Perhaps that’s why Kapwa feels like such a fitting theme for this year’s Global Pollinate Potluck.

The recognition that our progress is connected. That stronger entrepreneurs need stronger incubators. Stronger incubators need funders, investors and ecosystem partners who understand what it takes to do the work well. Nobody builds the ecosystem alone.

To everyone we met in Manila: we hope we’ll see you again this October - and this time, bring something to the Potluck. A lesson. A question. Something you’ve tried. Something you’re still figuring out.

🇵🇭 Global Pollinate Potluck 2026
📍 Manila | October 5–10
🎟️ Get your tickets here: https://www.pollinateimpact.org/events/global-potluck-2026/potluck2026_agenda/?tec-tab=2

11/09/2026

𝐊𝐚𝐩𝐰𝐚 𝐢𝐬 𝐚 𝐓𝐚𝐠𝐚𝐥𝐨𝐠 𝐜𝐨𝐧𝐜𝐞𝐩𝐭 𝐭𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐦𝐞𝐚𝐧𝐬 "𝐬𝐡𝐚𝐫𝐞𝐝 𝐢𝐝𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐢𝐭𝐲," "𝐭𝐨𝐠𝐞𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐫𝐧𝐞𝐬𝐬," 𝐨𝐫 𝐚 𝐝𝐞𝐞𝐩 𝐬𝐞𝐧𝐬𝐞 𝐨𝐟 𝐜𝐨𝐧𝐧𝐞𝐜𝐭𝐞𝐝𝐧𝐞𝐬𝐬 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡 𝐨𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐫𝐬.

We could have gathered anywhere. So why Manila? 🇵🇭

In the Philippines, there’s a concept called Kapwa - often understood as shared self or shared humanity. At its heart is a simple idea: we don’t exist separately from one another.

That idea sits at the heart of what we’re trying to build with the Potluck.

Our ecosystem doesn’t lack smart people, good ideas or hard-earned knowledge. But those things too often sit in different organisations, countries and corners of the sector. The challenges we’re trying to solve - talent, funding, stronger incubation, healthier ecosystems - don’t fit neatly into those boundaries.

They need us to find each other.

So this October in Manila, Kapwa is shaping the spirit of how we’ll come together: bringing what we know, being honest about what we don’t, and recognising that some things are simply better figured out together.

🇵🇭 Global Pollinate Potluck 2026
📍 Manila | October 5–10
🎟️ Register here: https://www.pollinateimpact.org/events/global-potluck-2026/potluck2026_agenda/

10/09/2026

Somewhere, another incubator has probably already tried the thing you’re currently debating in a team meeting. 👀

Maybe it worked brilliantly. Maybe it lasted three months. Maybe they learned exactly why nobody was willing to pay for it. Either way, wouldn’t you rather know?

That’s a big part of why the Global Pollinate Potluck exists.

Across our ecosystem, people are constantly testing new ideas, solving problems and learning things the hard way. But too often, those lessons stay inside the organisations that learned them.

So, we’re putting them on the table. 🍽️

At Honest Conversations on Revenue Models, May Thin Zar Aung from ONOW and Win Win Htet from ONOW will open up what their organisation has been experimenting with - including paid coaching and partnerships with financial institutions. Then, everyone else gets to bring their experiments too.

The wins. The flops. The “we thought this would work…” stories. 😅

Maybe we don’t need every incubator to figure out financial sustainability from scratch. And maybe we just need more opportunities to learn from what everyone else has already figured out.

📍 Global Pollinate Potluck 2026 | Manila
🎟️ Get your tickets here: https://www.pollinateimpact.org/events/global-potluck-2026/potluck2026_agenda/?tec-tab=3

07/09/2026

We just launched our Talent Report: Investing in the People Who Power Incubation, and somehow ended up with more questions.

Don't get us wrong, we’re pretty happy about that.

Investing in the People Who Power Incubation gave us a much clearer picture of the people behind impact incubation in the Global South. But some of the things we found made us want to keep digging.

If we invest more in the people supporting entrepreneurs, what changes? Do they become better mentors? Do their organisations become stronger? Do the entrepreneurs they support ultimately do better?

We don’t have all those answers yet.

But here’s what we do have: researchers who know how to interrogate these questions, and practitioners who are living them every day.

We’d like to get them around the same table.

So, researchers and academic institutions, consider this your invitation. Read the report. Poke holes in it. Tell us what we should be asking next. And come continue the conversation with us at the Global Pollinate Potluck in Manila.

Because good research can give us answers.
Really good research can also give us better questions.

📖 Read Investing in the People Who Power Incubation: https://www.pollinateimpact.org/reports/talent-challenge-impact-incubation/
🍽️ Join us in Manila to continue these conversations: https://www.pollinateimpact.org/events/global-potluck-2026/

03/09/2026

Who supports the organisations supporting everyone else? 👀

Incubators spend so much time helping entrepreneurs grow. But how often do they get to step back and ask: what do we need to grow stronger?

That’s what the Global Pollinate Potluck is here for - creating space to step out of the day-to-day, get honest about what we need, and work on it together.

On October 6, Ruod Ariete from Pollinate Impact will lead Growth Check Labs, where you’ll put our Incubator Effectiveness Diagnostic Tool to work on your own organisation and leave with 1–2 growth priorities to take back to your team.

Because stronger support for entrepreneurs needs stronger incubators behind it. 🌱

📍 Global Pollinate Potluck | Manila
🎟️ Register here: https://www.pollinateimpact.org/events/global-potluck-2026/potluck2026_agenda/

27/08/2026

We didn’t come up with most of it. Our network did.

Over the last two years, through our research, programmes, convenings and conversations with members, we’ve been hearing the questions people across the ecosystem are actually wrestling with. Questions about funding. Talent. Sustainability. The quality of incubation. What we measure. And what needs to change for incubators to thrive.

So when we started building the Potluck agenda, those questions became the starting point. And here’s one of them:

𝐖𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐢𝐟 𝐢𝐦𝐩𝐚𝐜𝐭 𝐢𝐧𝐜𝐮𝐛𝐚𝐭𝐨𝐫𝐬 𝐚𝐫𝐞 𝐬𝐮𝐜𝐜𝐞𝐞𝐝𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐢𝐧 𝐰𝐚𝐲𝐬 𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐦𝐞𝐭𝐫𝐢𝐜𝐬 𝐜𝐚𝐧’𝐭 𝐬𝐞𝐞?

Revenue, jobs created and capital raised matter. But do they tell us everything about stronger businesses, healthier ecosystems, resilient communities and the longer-term change incubators help create?

At the Global Pollinate Potluck, William Davidson Institute will bring research and tested indicators to the table. Practitioners will bring their experience. And together, we’ll start asking what a better scorecard could look like.

That’s really what this agenda is about. Creating a space for the ecosystem to work on the questions it’s already asking.

🍽️ Beyond VC Metrics: Redefining Success for Impact Incubators
📅 October 6 | Global Pollinate Potluck, Manila

Come help us rethink the scorecard: https://www.pollinateimpact.org/events/global-potluck-2026/potluck2026_agenda/?tec-tab=2

26/08/2026

Almost every incubator promises entrepreneurs access to mentors.
Investors. Industry experts. Successful founders. Specialists. People who’ve “been there, done that.”

And we put a lot of effort into building those networks.

But here’s the tension: being an expert at something doesn’t automatically make you good at helping someone else navigate it.

Good mentoring is a craft. It means knowing how to listen, when to challenge, how to ask the question that unlocks something, and when to resist giving the answer altogether.

And the quality of that craft matters.

Research cited in our upcoming Talent Report found that entrepreneurs paired with higher-ability mentors recorded 3.2% higher revenue and 3.5% higher profit one year after incubation than those paired with lower-ability mentors.

The gains were even greater for entrepreneurs with less prior business experience.

Yet mentoring can still be one of the most celebrated parts of an incubation programme - and one of the least developed.

Maybe the question isn’t how many mentors are in our network.
Maybe it’s how good they are at mentoring.

If better mentoring can lead to better entrepreneur outcomes, developing mentors isn’t an add-on to programme delivery.
It is programme delivery.

We’re digging into this tension, and many others, in our upcoming Talent Report.

25/08/2026

We say this all the time: incubators and investors need to talk to each other more.

They’re both trying to help entrepreneurs grow. But somewhere between incubation and investment, things still get lost in translation.

What does “investment ready” actually mean? When should investors enter the conversation? And are we waiting too long to have these conversations?

These are some of the questions behind our second Collective Action Team (CAT) on Strengthening Investor–Incubator Relations, which kicked off with 47 participants from 22 investor groups and incubators.

Over the coming months, they’ll move beyond identifying the gaps to co-creating practical ways to close them.

Better pathways to capital need to be built by the people supporting entrepreneurs and the people investing in them.

CAT 2 has officially begun. 🌱

24/08/2026

Almost every incubator promises entrepreneurs access to networks.

But being part of a network and benefiting from one are two very different things.

The evidence in What Actually Works in Impact Incubation points to a more active role for incubators: knowing which connections founders actually need, making the right introductions, and helping turn them into real opportunities.

Because it’s not about who founders have access to.

It’s what they can actually DO with that access.

Explore the guide: https://www.pollinateimpact.org/reports/impact-incubation-guide/

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