HOW THE CO-LABS
CAN WORK FOR YOU
PREPARE FOR CONFERENCES and hit the ground running
Make your conference more engaging and impactful by preparing for conference tracks together with selected participants, sponsors or people who cannot attend, before it begins, hitting the ground running when you are there - ready to continue the conversation immediately when you are there.
With careful prior outreach, curation, design, and follow-through, Catalyst Co-Labs convene and launch collaboration among conference participants to ignite ideas and action on their strategic challenges – whether before, during or after conferences, or all three.
This strategy invites attendees to move beyond panels and networking cocktails to hands-on co-creation and action with Catalyst Co-Labs.
Why Co-Labs for conferences?
Conferences are powerful engines for building community and sharing –both formally and informally.
As the urgency to move “from talk to action” is ever more urgent in the social sector, conference organizers are seeking new ways to catalyze collaborations among their participants.
Additionally, competition from a growing number of events, both in person and online, pushes organizers to attract action-minded changemakers, sponsors, and partners by offering them tangible ways to engage and create outcomes, together.
Melton Foundation Global Citizenship Conference
INVEST IN A CO-LAB FOR A SOCIAL INNOVATOR OR NGO
Leverage the investment you’ve already made in your grantees, fellows, and award winners, by offering them a Co-Lab to expand your grantees’ networks and accelerate their impact.
Through this model, Catalyst Co-Labs helps grantees articulate a specific challenge they face, and take action together with experts and innovators around the world who share, have solved, or are interested in solving the challenge. Through the Co-Lab, they ideate solutions and build lasting collaborations through their expanded networks. Sometimes, it even leads to additional funding.
Why invest more through a Co-Lab?
Funders invest in grantees to fulfil their mission. These grassroots change makers are lifelines to healthcare, education, and safety. Other change makers are the drivers of systemic change at the national and global levels.
However, many of these change makers – especially those in marginalized communities – face barriers to finding and getting heard from potential partners and additional funders. Many philanthropists recognize this problem and are actively seeking solutions. Opening the door to networks, expanding their reach and using your social capital can amplify their work and increase all of yours collective impact.
Millennium Fellows
EXPAND COLLABORATION ACROSS YOUR NETWORK and widen the reach
Catalyst Co-Labs offer a powerful, hands-on way to spark collaboration—within your network and beyond. They create immediate opportunities to bring members together around shared challenges and opportunities, enabling deeper connection and faster progress.
With support from Catalyst Co-Labs, you can engage your members and stakeholders in a focused, action-oriented process that builds relationships, generates fresh ideas, and lays the groundwork for real-world solutions and partnerships—across regions, sectors, and disciplines.
Why Co-Labs for Networks?
Impact networks of social entrepreneurs, funders, and mission-driven leaders are essential to advancing the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). But increasingly, their members—and boards—are asking: How do we move from connection to action?
Co-Labs help networks do exactly that: mobilize collective intelligence, focus energy, and turn conversation into meaningful collaboration.
The Wellbeing Project Ecosystem Network Retreat
