At FEST’s beginning as a Working Group of Catalyst2030 in 2020, the focus was on developing an operating environment that supports financing for systemic transformation (FST) by social entrepreneurs. Their potential is held back by the lack of such financing. Over three years of work by the Working Group revealed that the traditional and progressive approaches to finance are deeply embedded in assumptions, values and goals (see: What is “Financing Systemic Transformation”) that make creation of FST flows very, very difficult. Therefore, effort to create FST flows became understood as effort to transform finance itself.

This does not mean that FEST’s success is determined by transformation of the whole traditional and progressive finance system. Rather, FEST will judge its success by the transformation of a sufficiently large part of that system to meet the needs for scale and ease of flow of FST and its implementation.