The day before Impact Minds 2026 (Latimpacto’s conference) opened, I visited MUSA — the Museu da Amazônia, just outside Manaus. I hadn't planned it as research. But that's where I first heard about the sumaúma and the angelim-pedra: trees with a slow metabolism, built to grow for centuries, anchoring an entire canopy around them. Other species in the same forest do the opposite, shoot up fast, take the light quickly, and die young. I didn't know it yet, but that was the metaphor I'd spend the next three days watching play out in a conference room
I've spent a few years evaluating conferences from the outside, covering how these issues move markets and politics at a macro level. That vantage point teaches you the external language of a sector. It doesn't teach you how it actually moves, that difference became obvious to me at Impact Minds, what happened during that week wasn't mainly about new instruments or vehicles. It was a revolution in how we structure thought.
A revolution in thinking
That revolution is hard precisely because we're young at it. The thought-systems we inherited from the last centuries aren't resilient; they are fragmented and come from urgency, from short-termism. What this sector needs instead is exploratory thinking, with built-in redundancy, developed over longer time horizons — and time is the one privilege we have that we keep refusing to spend. The world imposes a sense of urgency that cuts straight across how human thought actually handles complexity. Standardizing these ecosystems was never going to be obvious. So the answer was never going to be obvious, or fast, either.
That's the lens I brought to the numbers coming out of Manaus. Attendance was down roughly 25%, to about 600 delegates from close to 800 in Oaxaca in 2024. US and European funders are visibly redirecting toward Africa and Ukraine, while regional capital sits underdeployed. Read cold, that's the data that feeds the question I asked constantly: is impact investing shrinking? But then it's also, almost word for word, the read Catherine Clark (in this wonderful article) pushes back on: the market isn't shrinking, it's changing phase — shedding the “impact tourists” who were never deeply committed, and moving out of a scale phase into one of quality and depth. Manaus, for me, was the field confirmation of that thesis: a smaller room, and a harder, more honest conversation.
Contribution, not attribution
That shift had a method behind it in the Family Day sessions. Alejandro Alvarez, of Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors, opened with a warning wrapped in humility: capital owners assume that having the money puts them at the center of the solution.
You are not the sun in the universe. — Alejandro Alvarez, Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors
His fix was a move from attribution — claiming individual credit for an outcome — to contribution: recognizing you're one piece in a much larger system, and mapping where a targeted intervention can unlock disproportionate leverage.
Lucas Matarazzo, my travel mate and Mútua's co-founder, was on the same panel, making the same case from a different angle: no single actor solves a systemic challenge alone, so the question was never “how do I attribute this impact solely to my dollar,” but “how do my resources contribute alongside allies and complementary strategies.” Which is also the argument Mútua exists to operationalize.
A crisis of evidence
Also during the Family day, Fabio Segura, CEO at the Jacobs Foundation, cut in a related direction: capital alone solves nothing — it's a doorway that brings the right people to the table, not the source of impact itself. Fall in love with a problem, he argued, not with an instrument, or “everything becomes a nail to your hammer.” His sharpest claim: this sector's problem was never a lack of innovation. It was, and is, the continuous overfunding of approaches already known not to work — a crisis of evidence, not of ideas.
Patient instruments
A sumaúma doesn't compete with the fast-cycling species growing in its shade, it does a different job, on a different clock. That's closer to what I think Catherine Clark means when she describes this next phase as a cycle between innovation and standardization, not a retreat from scale: market-rate capital, guarantees, recoverable grants, first-loss capital, and philanthropy aren't competing for the same role in this forest. Each is built for a different one, and it's the guarantees, the blended stacks, the concessionary layers that are the sumaúmas of this ecosystem: instruments built to grow on a slower metabolism than market-rate capital can sustain.
What Manaus made clear is that this shift already resonates with what impact-first funds and family offices have at their disposal.
It's been such a privilege, having to sit this closely with these reflections instead of just reporting on it. And that’s what we're building at Mútua: managing strategy over time, learning which capital belongs where and what works in practice. We are not selling certainty. We are building the capability for the impact ecosystem to make uncertainty legible, to navigate uncertainty and learn, together., Our platform is a place that shows the cumulative learning of the field and asks the right questions about what we still need to discover, making the transactions and learning that follow sum up to contribute to the deep transitions our world needs.
