Building connections with MIST

Regen Melbourne recently launched Melbourne Invests in Systemic Transformation (MIST) – a platform to explore the potential of capital to drive systemic change. Josh Devine explains how MIST aims to be a place of connection and communication in these complex times. 

Over the last year, I have met many remarkable people who are rethinking, rewiring and creating new infrastructure for how we invest, what we value and what an economy that actually serves life can look like.

All of this at a moment when we’re confronting devastating global conflict and the sentiment: "It's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism", rings truer than ever. 

It’s these people I’ve connected with on projects, articles I have stumbled across, and talks I have listened to on long walks, that fill me with hope and continue to refill my cup. This work reminds me every day that while it’s easy to feel helpless, we have far more agency than we might realise. 

Across the globe and right here in Melbourne, there are extraordinary pockets of work already happening. People investing their time, energy and capital toward something different. Like, the continued growth of Community Foundations in Australia and the reforms that are making it easier to participate in local decision-making, resource distribution and long-term community investment. And the growing global community of TWIST, people and organisations who are actively deploying capital or enabling processes for positive systems change. 

The more I connect with those working in this space around the world, the more convinced I am that we have something genuinely special in this city. 

Melbourne has its shadows – homelessness, division, inequality, a complacency embodied by the Australian attitude of “she’ll be right, mate” – these are real and urgent challenges. But we also have many strengths that can position the city as a shining light for the world: strong social infrastructure, robust institutions, physical distance from global conflict, a belief in the importance of a fair go for all, the wisdom of the oldest living civilisation on earth, and a culture of people who care and and who show up. 

These are the foundations on which we can build a more hopeful, regenerative future.

What I keep coming back to in the projects and conversations, is that ingredients for this transitional work exists. The people exist. The communities moving and using capital differently exist. A culture and track record of innovating and changing the financial sector exist. The financial Institutions with the capital required to invest in Australians' future exist. The understanding that something needs to change is growing and becoming harder to ignore. What's trickier to find is the connective tissue across Melbourne – the spaces where these efforts can find each other, learn, begin to nest together across the silos that keep so much aligned work apart, and build a new kind of infrastructure and scaffolding to support resilience.

That is why Regen Melbourne has launched Melbourne Invests in Systemic Transformation (MIST) – a place between the capital.

MIST is a platform for events, gatherings, papers and active dialogue, designed to shift how we coordinate capital toward systemic change, and to explore what it means to redefine value, returns and economic performance in the process. It’s a space to bring together investors, practitioners, researchers and community leaders – both locally and globally – to grapple honestly with the complexity of the work, to learn from each other, and to ground it all firmly in the reshaping and the doing here in Melbourne. And to balance “the stuff and the stories”.

The work is organised around four interconnected objectives:

Shift narratives: Drive a broader dialogue that supports the inner and outer work required to challenge and reimagine dominant economic and capital systems to be more in service of life. 

Grow a field of practice: Build a community and the knowledge, tools and relationships that make long-term shifts and implementation possible.

Activate system actors: Bring together the individuals and organisations who are ready to try something different.

Coordinate capital together: Facilitate the flow of money between those who hold it and the interventions that need it, accelerating the movement of capital toward systemic change.

These four strands that make up MIST are interconnected and mutually reinforcing. You can't shift paradigms without shifting narratives. You can't sustain a field or systems without the relationships that hold it. And none of it moves without people.

Over the next 12 months, MIST is hosting a series of events (both online and in-person), designed to bring investors and financial ecosystem leaders together. The series kicked off in April with a conversation with John Fullerton, founder of Capital Institute and a leading voice in regenerative economics. John shared the Eight Principles of a regenerative economy and invited us all to re-think “how we might redesign capital so that it becomes wiser, more systemic and better aligned with the health of living systems such as the Birrarung”. You can listen back to the conversation here. 

If you are an investor, a practitioner, a researcher or simply someone who believes this city's transformation is worth investing in, in every sense of that word, please come and join – I would love for you to be part of this.

Want to learn more about MIST? All webinars, events and resources can be found here

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