Catalyst Now Awards 2025

We recognise that there are specific activities or practices undertaken by corporations which can and do lead to direct impact and ecosystem change. With an Award (or several Awards), we seek to highlight these best practices for private-sector engagement with the social enterprise/social entrepreneurship sector, where they have led to direct benefits as well as ecosystem shifts towards inclusiveness, equity, and sustainability.

Award Specific Criteria

An awardee must demonstrate that the company* has experience and a commitment to working with social entrepreneurs (SEs), and that it can demonstrate the following:

• It has embedded working with SEs into its business operating systems beyond CSR/sustainability activity.
• It understands the interconnectedness and interdependence of the SDGs and therefore works at addressing them in an integrated manner.
• It understands and discloses its direct and indirect impacts publicly.
• Its business resonates with the Catalyst Now values and can demonstrate how it does this.
• It is creating structural and systemic changes within its sector, its community, and society as a whole.
• It understands and has management processes for reducing its negative social and/or environmental impacts, and is moving towards or has achieved ‘decent work,’ net-zero, circular, or regenerative practices.

*Seek nominations from those beyond the ‘usual suspects.’

This award celebrates individuals and organisations that have deployed capital to support project(s) or initiative(s) to achieve systems change. Within this award, there are four sub-categories that inform the final award, leveraging the Catalyst Now Funder Diagnostic Survey. These categories were informed by the Embracing Complexity Report.

This award is the first of its kind to focus on the funding of systems change entrepreneurs.

1. Leader in Learning

• Embrace a systems mindset. Demonstrated public promotion of lessons learned in supporting systems change.
• Demonstrated humility in sharing what has not worked and promoting learning for others.
• Funding of research and other public documents to support better practices in funding systems change. Funding of monitoring, evaluation, and learning of systems change projects to support learning across the ecosystem.

2. Leader in Trust

• Support evolving paths to systems change and prepare for long-term engagement.
• Lifting funders relinquishing control through multi-year unrestricted funding.

3. Leader in Partnership

• Work in true partnership, lifting funders who acknowledge and work against power dynamics.
• Relational over transactional, listening to what systems change leaders need and providing targeted financial and non-financial support in an effort to co-create the desired impact approach and appropriate funding structure.
• Take time to build trust with their grantees, including through regular, honest, and respectful discussions, and/or simplify and right-size the application and reporting effort.

4. Leader in Transformative Compliance

• This award celebrates individuals and organisations that have deployed capital to support proximate actors’ project(s) or initiative(s) to achieve systems change by transforming compliance practices.
• This award recognises those who demonstrate a commitment to learning and continuous improvement, with a specific focus on equitable giving for sustainable development by streamlining due diligence and compliance processes.

Criteria

Nominators were asked to assess the nominated organisations on each of the following criteria:

1. To what extent does the organisation you are nominating seek out information on the systems underlying the issues you care about?
2. To what extent does the organisation you are nominating address the uneven power dynamic between them and grantees/investees?
3. When choosing an initiative to support, how much uncertainty is the organisation you are nominating typically comfortable with?
4. How does the organisation you are nominating respond to failure to achieve expected outputs or outcomes?
5. To what extent does the organisation you are nominating allow its strategy to be influenced by grantees/investees?
6. When selecting among grantee/investee candidates, to what extent does the organisation you are nominating prioritise those who are most impacted but don’t currently have much power within the system?
7. To what extent does the organisation you are nominating enable coordination among grantees/investees or with other stakeholders (e.g., business, government, media)?
8. To what extent has the organisation you are nominating implemented a MEL (monitoring, evaluation, learning) plan to help adapt their strategy over time?
9. To what extent does the organisation you are nominating provide funding to support reasonable salaries for team members of funded organisations, rather than focusing on “reducing overhead”?
10. To what extent does the organisation you are nominating use practices that help them navigate the complexity of systems change (e.g., intentionally conducting and learning from experiments)?

Eligibility

Any individual or organisation that donates or provides grant funds to support social entrepreneurs in creating systems change.

Individuals and organisations can be located in any country and can focus on any impact area.

All nominated organisations are required to move through a due diligence process.