The Editor’s Post: A decade of Impact City – fuelling founders in the ‘city of peace and justice’

Anna Patton 31st October 2025

The Hague celebrates ten years as the self-described "Impact City", while Taipei buzzes with Social Enterprise World Forum energy. Plus, a further fall for VC investment in impact startups. The view from the Pioneers Post newsroom, this week from the Netherlands.

In 2020, I reported on the move of the Draper Richards Kaplan Foundation to the Hague. The American venture philanthropy funder looked at the UK and Switzerland for its new Europe base – but plumped instead for the Netherlands’ third-largest city, citing a particularly welcoming climate for impact enterprises and a “burgeoning and rich ecosystem”.

I didn’t get a chance to catch up with the DRK team this week, but from what I saw things are still booming in the Hague, which is now celebrating ten years as the self-described Impact City, a programme run and funded by the municipality. One very visible element of its influence is more physical space for entrepreneurs to meet and make things happen. “Ten years ago, there were no such places in the city,” Impact City’s Coos Santing told me, on the sidelines of its annual conference, ImpactFest. Today, there are nine impact innovation or entrepreneurship hubs. Titaan is one of them: renovated by the municipality and now owned by a private company, it wants to “fuel founders to fix the future”, and to become Europe’s number one impact campus (it already claims to be the biggest). Titaan even boasts its own in-house university where students can start a company from day one, while they study for an accredited business degree.

Plenty of places claim to be the natural home of social impact, but in the Hague, “we have some legacy”, as Santing put it. The city hosted its first historic international peace conference in 1899. Today, alongside heavyweights like the International Court of Justice, hundreds of organisations continue working on these lofty goals. Many are based in another new space – the Humanity Hub, created in 2018 to host “changemakers working towards a more peaceful and just world”.

Peace and justice may be top of mind for many founders, but they're not getting much attention from VC investors, according to data released this week. Other vital sectors are also apparently dropping down the list of priorities: this year, food security startups are expected to raise just half the capital they raised last year. And circular economy businesses worldwide are projected to attract less than US$300bn – their lowest level in more than 10 years. Other sectors look more promising, but overall, the picture isn’t too rosy. Where does that leave impact startups? Our contributor Markus Freiburg, for one, sees a world beyond VC – and he reckons he’s got the recipe.

Finally, it’s been one of those weeks when way too many events compete for our attention. Alongside ImpactFest, this week has seen SOCAP in San Francisco, the Global Social and Solidarity Economy Forum in Bordeaux, and the Social Enterprise World Forum in Taipei. Our reporter David Lyons is among the 1,000 people attending SEWF; as well as interviewing Taiwan’s social innovation superstar, he’s been listening to the hot topics discussed on and off stage – get your first update here and stay tuned for more.