Inside Forum’s Learning and Impact Week, May 2026

As a global organisation working across Asia, the UK, and the Americas in diverse social, environmental, and economic contexts, we see learning as essential to strengthening our work towards ensuring a just and regenerative future. Our Learning and Impact Week emerged from this ethos. After initially experimenting with cross-organisational learning days in 2023, Forum adapted the approach this year into three dedicated Learning and Impact Weeks across 2026. The week-long formats intentionally create space and organisational rhythm for:

• reflection,
• capability building,
• and collective inquiry.

At the same time, we recognise that dedicated learning spaces alone are not enough. Becoming a truly reflective and adaptive organisation requires embedding learning more consistently into our everyday work through ongoing project reflection, feedback, and shared practice. 

The Learning and Impact Week in April 2026 brought together our team of 64 staff across time zones through a mix of compulsory and optional sessions, ranging from deep practice conversations and project share-outs to external guest speakers and open spaces for peer learning. Across the week, sessions explored evolving areas of practice and emerging questions shaping Forum’s work, including:

• systems thinking,
• futures,
• design,
• decoloniality,
• equity,
• and the implications of AI for society and the environment. 

What made this Learning and Impact Week particularly significant was not only the breadth of topics, but the emphasis on openness, reflection, and collective learning.  

Staff were encouraged to shape their individual learning as well as contribute to organisational learning priorities across the week, with opportunities to opt into sessions most relevant to their work and interests. A live Miro board captured reflections, questions, and emerging insights in real time, helping surface both areas of strength and places where the organisation still wants to deepen its understanding. More than a standalone initiative, we hope that Learning and Impact Week reflects Forum’s broader commitment to being a learning organisation, one that continually reflects, learns, adapts, and evolves in response to the world around us. We see creating equitable flows of learning across the organisation as central to living our mission internally, and to embodying the just and regenerative change we seek to support externally. 

Feedback from across the organisation was overwhelmingly positive, with many people valuing the opportunity to slow down, reflect, and reconnect learning to practice. The week has already helped shape ideas for Learning and Impact Weeks later in 2026, including a stronger thematic focus on monitoring, evaluation and learning (MEL), and impact, alongside continued exploration of what just and regenerative practice looks like across different contexts and geographies. 

The week also surfaced a broader reflection: dedicated space for learning is incredibly valuable, but increasingly rare in many people’s working and personal lives. It prompted us to ask: should learning together feel like a reward, or should it be recognised as a fundamental part of how we stay reflective, adaptive, and responsive in a rapidly changing world? 

At Forum, we try to share our learning more broadly through our website, project outputs, events, and social media, while recognising there is always more that we can do to help these insights travel further. We believe organisations that are fortunate enough to create space for learning should also be sharing what they are discovering along the way.