The Editor’s Post: Changing the story, from Medellín to Manaus

Anna Patton 5th September 2025

A glimpse into the future, telling better stories, and bringing capitalism to the heart of the Amazon rainforest: the view from the Pioneers Post newsroom, this week in Medellín, Colombia.

At Latimpacto’s annual conference in Medellín, Colombia, this week, I came across this news headline: ‘Decentralised impact funds led by communities redefine development funds across Latin America’. It’s not a real headline, before you get too excited, but a response to a generative AI tool that the research team at Latimpacto has developed. It draws on information about the present – Latimpacto reports, member surveys, its AI analysis of impact investor activity in the region – to help users think about where they might be headed and how they can get there. So, ask it what a typical impact investing news headline in 20 years will look like, and the headline above comes up as a possible (although not probable) answer.

One stepping stone to the ideal future – one with headlines like the one above, perhaps – is by telling more compelling stories about moving money for good. There seems to be growing recognition of this, and my colleague Julie and I were pleasantly surprised to see a strong turnout for our storytelling workshop on the final afternoon of the conference, a time when most attendees are saturated with new ideas, ready to go home, or just feeling the effects of the night before (this bunch knows how to throw a party). One of the questions from participants was about standing out from the crowd: how do you come up with something really creative instead of telling the same kind of stories as everyone else? In a way, that’s a nice problem to have: it shows that there’s a big enough field for it to start to feel crowded. But there’s definitely room to improve, and it’s great that impact finance people are eager to do just that.

The capitalist world distances us from seeing ourselves as nature, but we are in it

One powerful story all around us this week was that of Medellín’s transformation, from one of the most dangerous cities in the world in the 1990s, to being named the “world’s most innovative” in 2013, to favoured spot for digital nomads today. The architecture and transport system are seriously impressive, but it’s the abundance of greenery that really catches your eye. It’s not all perfect, of course. Our host at Urbania, a coffee B Corp that a group of us visited on day one of the conference, commented that the city had become “crazy gentrified”. But it’s clear that many (most?) cities in the world could learn from Medellín's achievements. I overheard an attendee from Brazil say that Medellín had more trees than Manaus, which is in the middle of the Amazon rainforest.

Speaking of Manaus, the city was revealed on Wednesday as the host for Latimpacto’s 2026 conference. As Vanda Witoto, executive director of Instituto Witoto in Manaus, told the audience during the closing session: “The capitalist world distances us from seeing ourselves as nature, but we are in it.” No excuse, then, for the impact investors gathering this time next year in the so-called “lungs of the Earth”.