Twist Strategic Pillars
Building and Nurturing our Community of Practice
The first of TWIST’s strategic pillars is to intentionally build and nurture our Community of Practice. The Community brings together investors, practitioners, and facilitators who are actively exploring and applying systemic investing with the intention to contribute to positive systems change.
This pillar acknowledges that transformation happens within a community. Nurturing this community means cultivating trust, enabling peer support, and creating space for mutual learning. By sharing strategies, challenges, and insights, members inspire and support one another, building the connective tissue that a resilient systems investing field needs.
Members of the Community of Practice help co-create TWIST’s vision and activities, from shaping our systems mapping work to guiding our strategic learning journeys. Each member contributes to a living library of case studies that document real-world efforts to shift systems, case studies that are also shared with academic partners to support rigorous research and broader field-building.
While the case studies shared through the Community vary widely in context, geography, and form, they all share a defining characteristic: they involve the deployment or facilitation of capital with the explicit intention to drive systems-level change. These efforts reflect the values of experimentation, learning, and stewardship that lie at the heart of TWIST.
Building Evidence for Investing in Systems Change
TWIST’s second strategic pillar is focused on building evidence to support learning, credibility, and replication in the emerging field of systemic investing. To truly advance this field, a growing body of evidence is needed to document how this work is happening in practice.
Through research partnerships with the MIT Sloan Sustainability Initiative and the Deep Transitions Lab, TWIST is creating a platform to capture, analyse, and publish real-world examples of systems change investing. Members of our Community of Practice contribute directly to this effort by completing a detailed case study template, co-designed with our academic partners. These case studies templates are data-rich reflections that explore how systems-level strategies differ from traditional sustainable or impact investing approaches.
Contributing to Awareness, Clarity and Education
Mastery of Systems Leadership - Hosted by Small Giants
A year-long immersive programme, developed by Small Giants, offers a deep dive into systems thinking, leadership, and regenerative change, designed for those seeking to lead in complex environments with clarity and purpose.
TWIST’s third strategic pillar recognises the importance of cultivating the knowledge, language, and leadership capacities that can support a new generation of systemic investors.
We’re committed to helping practitioners, investors, and changemakers understand what it means to invest with systems change in mind: how to see interconnections, surface leverage points, and act with both courage and care. To support this mission, TWIST support two pioneering educational programmes to help design, deliver, and amplify transformative learning experiences that equip individuals and institutions for this emerging practice.
Investing for Systems Change Accelerate Programme - Hosted by CSP North America
A three-day intensive training addressing private investors who want to explore what systemic investing looks like in practice. Through systems mapping, peer dialogue, case studies, and field visits, participants engage with practical ways to identify leverage points in complex systems, understanding where capital can shift patterns and what catalytic action looks like in real life.
Catalysing Capital for Systems Change
The fourth of TWIST’s strategic pillars is to catalyse more capital flow to system changes.
Shifting capital toward transformative outcomes won’t happen on its own. It requires active effort to challenge existing norms, reimagine the role of investment, and build the connective infrastructure that enables capital to move differently. At TWIST, we see it as our responsibility to help shape the broader ecosystem by supporting the practices, relationships, and structures that allow capital to flow in service of systemic transformation.
Through our convenings, case studies, and collaborations, we aim to illuminate where capital is already acting as a lever for change, and what it takes to amplify and replicate those efforts. We work to bridge the gap between bold ideas and bold capital, supporting investors, intermediaries, and practitioners in designing and deploying capital with integrity, purpose, and systems awareness.
This pillar reflects our belief that systemic investing is not just a set of practices, but a movement that must be resourced, nurtured, and intentionally grown.
Enabling a Personal, Team and Collective Mindset Shift
The fifth and transversal pillar of TWIST is cultivating the mindset shift necessary for systems change.
This pillar acts as the roots from which all other pillars draw strength. We believe that no lasting transformation in capital, community, or evidence can occur without a parallel shift in mindset, both personal and collective. Our work is grounded in the understanding that systems change requires inner change.
At TWIST, we create space to examine the interconnectedness between inner and outer transformation. We support our community to cultivate greater self-awareness, humility, and systems literacy. This foundation of inner work helps unlock new ways of thinking, relating, and acting, enabling the kind of leadership and collaboration that systemic investing demands.
By placing mindset shift at the heart of everything we do, we aim to nurture the deeper capacities required to reimagine and regenerate the systems we seek to change.