Illuminate 2026 - Day 4: What if the System You Need Doesn't Exist Yet?

Day 4 of 4 of the Illuminate Series, presented by Coralus x Future of Good

Building new markets, changing systems and creating the businesses of the future.

Eventually, doing things differently takes us beyond improving individual businesses.

Sometimes the market doesn’t exist yet. Sometimes every stakeholder has to move. Sometimes solving the visible problem only reproduces the conditions that created it. And sometimes creating the future requires letting go of the stories, identities and assumptions that made sense in the old one.

Chloé Dubois of Ocean Legacy shares a journey from grief and environmental crisis into creating markets and infrastructure for recovered ocean plastics.

Chenny Xia of Gotcare explores what happens when transformation can’t happen one stakeholder at a time — when entrepreneurs, funders, institutions, customers and communities have to move together.

And Vicki brings the Coralus story: more than a decade of tiny experiments in redesigning how capital moves, how decisions get made, how relationships become infrastructure and how communities can recognize and resource possibilities before the existing system knows what to do with them.

This is where the four days ultimately lead:

You don’t have to lose your soul to create change. But you may have to lose some of your stories about how change happens.

Question underneath the day: If we stopped trying to win at the old game, what could we begin building instead?