About

Organizers

The convening is organized by the newly-established Swiss-based “Fund for Nature-centric Organisations,” with support from the V. Kann Rasmussen Foundation. The organizers have entrusted the program design and session planning to a diverse, independent group of leading strategic thinkers from academia and the nonprofit sector.

Purpose

The convening will serve as a generative environment in which philosophical and conceptual exploration meet practical application. The convening is structured to:

  • advance the core concepts that comprise nature’s inherent value, independent of human utility, and the understanding of them; 

  • surface existing frameworks, blueprints, methodologies, and toolboxes that can be used to support larger influential organizations in their transition to more nature-centric forms;

  • identify the processes required to guide large organizations through nature-centric transformation; 

  • serve as a forum for the dissemination of key insights and lessons from existing projects;

  • solve questions about the types of actors needed in an ecosystem for this type of transformation, and point to existing gaps while advancing collective thinking about ways to fill them; and

  • strengthen peer relationships, and cross-sector and cross-disciplinary connections.

Defining Nature-Centric Organizational Transformation

In this context, nature-centrism is understood as a paradigm in which organizations:

  • treat nature not merely as a resource, risk, or externality, but as a living system with intrinsic value and agency; 

  • design organizational structures and operational models that align human activity with the functioning, thresholds, and regenerative capacity of ecosystems; 

  • embed ecological considerations upstream in organizational architecture, rather than addressing environmental impacts solely through downstream mitigation and add-on policies; 

  • accept ecological integrity and planetary boundaries as non-negotiable constraints shaping strategy, growth, and performance; and 

  • understand institutional success as inseparable from the health of the natural systems on which they depend.