Independent (Frederico Fezas Vital)

I am a Portuguese social entrepreneur, ecosystem builder, and cross-sector leader with more than 20 years of experience advancing social innovation, entrepreneurship, education, and systems change. My work has focused on one core challenge: how to mobilize people, institutions, and resources across sectors to tackle complex social problems in more effective, human, and scalable ways. Throughout my career, I have operated across civil society, academia, business, and public-interest initiatives, often in roles designed to connect worlds that too rarely collaborate with intention. I founded and led Terra dos Sonhos, a pioneering Portuguese NGO focused on improving the lives of vulnerable children and families. I later held leadership roles in organizations such as Junior Achievement Portugal, Ashoka Portugal, and the European Commission’s Bolsa do Empreendedorismo. Today, I serve as Executive Director of the Yunus Social Innovation Center at Católica-Lisbon School of Business and Economics, where I help drive research, learning, partnerships, and ecosystem-building around social innovation and impact. I also lead the Pact for Mental Health in the Workplace, a multi-stakeholder initiative working to place mental health at the center of organizational and societal transformation. My mission is to help redesign the way societies respond to exclusion, inequality, and systemic inefficiency. I believe social innovation is not peripheral. It is a necessary discipline for rethinking systems that are no longer fit for purpose. My work is about creating the conditions for meaningful change: strengthening ecosystems, enabling collaboration across unlikely actors, supporting changemakers, and helping institutions move from intention to action. My next chapter is closely linked to LOOM, a venture I am building to design and curate immersive learning journeys that expose leaders, innovators, investors, and institutions to real-world social innovation in context. Through LOOM, I want to create experiences that do not just inspire, but shift mindsets, deepen judgment, strengthen relationships, and generate concrete action. I see this as a way to bridge ecosystems, elevate under-recognized innovation from different parts of the world, and help more people and organizations learn directly from the places where transformative solutions are being built. My vision is of a future in which social innovation is embedded in the mainstream logic of leadership, education, investment, and public problem-solving. I want to contribute to a world where institutions are more courageous, economies are more inclusive, and innovation is assessed not only by speed or scale, but by its capacity to improve lives, restore dignity, and generate shared value. I believe the most transformative solutions emerge when different perspectives, sectors, and lived realities are brought into honest contact and mobilized toward common purpose. Catalyst 2030 resonates deeply with the kind of future I want to help build: one where collaboration is not rhetoric, but infrastructure for change.