In 2026, my NationSwell colleagues and I have fanned out across 11 cities in the U.S. to attend 13 conferences so far, with many more on the calendar this fall. We heard from extraordinary leaders and sat through packed main stages, joining conversations and panels spanning all the expected topics: AI, the future of philanthropy, workforce development, democracy, health, housing, and beyond. 

Much of what we heard onstage was thoughtful and urgent. But even as we heard extraordinary themes emerging from the conference stages themselves, some of the most interesting conversations were unfolding in the spaces between sessions. They happened in hallways, over coffees, and around tables where leaders could get a few layers deeper than the standard panel discussion allows for: What are you actually seeing inside of your organization? What’s changing? What are you worried about? What’s working? What are you doing that we might try, too?

Our team’s 2026 conference attendance was characterized by an increased appetite for these types of candid exchanges. As organizations continue to operate amid political uncertainty, funding constraints, and heightened reputational risk, leaders are increasingly looking to one another for the reassurance, good intel, and potential partnerships that will see them through. They still want to hear the big ideas, but they also want to go ten levels deeper; they want to get under the hood and see how other leaders are grappling with the issues in real time within their own organizations.

On October 27, NationSwell will convene its own Summit in Philadelphia, where we’ve been intentional about implementing many of the things we learned on the road this year as design elements. As we built the program, we kept returning to what we heard and saw at all those conferences: both the issues leaders are wrestling with, and the kinds of spaces that allow them to wrestle with them honestly. 

Below, we’ve translated a few of the overarching themes and trends that defined conferences in 2026, along with how we’re using them to strengthen our own in-person gathering.

The sector is under pressure, and leaders increasingly have to design for durability

If there was one meta-theme running through nearly every gathering we attended in 2026, it was the pressure that leaders are feeling across sectors. What happens to purpose-driven work when the environment it sits within is changing rapidly, deeply uncertain, and perhaps even hostile? Are our existing structures built for the moment we’re in? 

For many nonprofits, federal funding cuts have made sustainability an urgent concern (for some, the question has even shifted to survival). Companies are pursuing purpose and ESG commitments in a charged political environment, while foundations are reconsidering their roles as programs and institutions they have long supported come under threat. DEI commitments continue to face intense scrutiny. And all the while, leaders across sectors are facing the challenge of managing their teams through the disruption while trying to preserve their organizations’ ability to make meaningful progress.

All of this has changed the tenor of conversations about impact significantly. It is no longer enough to ask whether an initiative works in ideal conditions; leaders want to know whether the work holds up under pressure. I heard some version of that question in nearly every room I sat in this year, and it’s one I ask myself constantly about our own work at NationSwell.

We heard funders asking how their investments could become more durable and practitioners thinking more carefully about how to prove meaningful outcomes, rather than simply counting activities. We also heard growing recognition that impact strategy can’t sit apart from business strategy — the two need to be built together from the start, not reconciled after the fact. And, we saw a growing interest in coalition-building that reflects not only a practical desire to extend reach, but also a growing “safety-in-numbers” mentality: at a time when many organizations would prefer not to find themselves standing alone in the spotlight, better to move alongside like-minded others.

The specific pressures may vary from one organization to another, but the question sitting underneath the uncertainty is remarkably consistent: How do we continue to advance purpose-driven work when the environment around that work has fundamentally changed?

At our own Summit, where the theme is A Future Possible, we’ll begin by looking backward in order to look forward, taking these landscape shifts into account as we consider what history can teach us about periods of profound change. From there, we’ll turn our attention towards the leaders and approaches showing us what durable progress can look like in the present, spotlighting the work and ideas in tangible ways designed for others to be able to learn from and adapt them.

AI is accelerating the work, but also raising the stakes

Perhaps unsurprisingly, AI found its way into nearly every agenda we encountered, but the conversation has shifted meaningfully. The questions running through everything were how we can use these tools without automating harm, and where human judgment comes into play, particularly when efficiency is in tension with trust and equity.

There is also plenty to be hopeful about. We saw new tools designed to strengthen nonprofit operations, and promising new applications in areas like digital finance. Coalitions are cropping up all over to help organizations build their capacity rather than navigate the implementation of new technologies on their own.

At the same time, there was widespread acknowledgement that acceleration is not automatically synonymous with progress. Unequal access may widen the gaps between institutions with the resources to adopt new tools and those without them, and important decisions can become harder to question once they’ve been handed over to a system and labeled efficient.

One phrase showed up over and over again in the conference agendas, and I wrote it down: “Neutral AI is inequity at scale.”

That’s the responsibility so many leaders are sitting with right now: AI does not sit outside of our existing power structures, it absorbs them. If we want the new technologies we’re implementing to advance impact, human judgment can’t be something we layer on as a post-script; it must be baked in at the foundation to help shape how these tools are built, adopted, and governed.

Familiar problems are being considered for a less-than-familiar world

We also heard a host of conference themes this year that are in some ways even more familiar than AI. Health, housing, workforce development, economic mobility are all familiar topics to frequent conference attendees, but the wrapper around them has changed.

Health equity, for example, was explicitly framed on conference stages as being increasingly inseparable from civil rights. Workforce development occupied far more agenda space than in previous years, reflecting the scale of technological change and the uncertainty of what workers will need in the years to come. Questions about economic opportunity kept returning to place: Who gets to shape an investment? Whose knowledge counts? What would it mean for communities to have greater control over the decisions that affect them? I found myself circling back to this question in nearly every housing and workforce session I sat in this year.

These questions have always had roots in policy and power, but this year those connections were harder to treat as background conditions. Funding instability and flagging institutional trust are changing how progress happens while simultaneously making community-led approaches more urgent.

The spirit and relevance of place was top of mind for us in planning our own Summit, which will take place in Philadelphia’s National Constitution Center during the country’s 250th year. The anniversary invites reflection, even while we know that the history of this land and the people who have shaped it extends far beyond 250 years. 

At Summit, we want to be honest about what we have inherited while training our attention on what people are building now. “A Future Possible” is as much a statement of optimism as it is a question about what can be made from the conditions we are actually faced with.

The next era of convening should be designed around what happens between us

After a year of 13 conferences (and many more to come this fall!), what became clear to us is that leaders need more than a stage to sit in front of.

Attendees deserve good ideas and speakers worth traveling for — and they also deserve room to grapple with those ideas once they hear them. They need the space to admit that a strategy is no longer working; to ask the question before it has been polished for public consumption; to recognize that someone across the table is facing the same problem.

Creating the space for that kind of trust and candor was our main design principle for Summit. The stages matter, but so do the tables, the transition spaces, the conversations that continue on after the formal programming has ended. We want to equip folks with everything they need to walk away with new relationships and potential next moves, and we’re treating those exchanges as part of the substance of the day.

The true measure of a convening is not what happens onstage, but whether people leave with a cleaner understanding of the moment, a sharper awareness of who stands beside them, and a renewed sense of what is possible when we build together. I’m beyond excited to see our NationSwell community in Philadelphia this October, for the building that can happen onstage, offstage, and far beyond!