The GSF Learning Festival 2026 – Connective tissue: Trust and the spaces between us

The GSF Learning Festival 2026 - Connective tissue: trust and the spaces between us

We are delighted to share that the GSF Learning Festival returns on 2 and 3 September 2026, 11:00am to 3:30pm GMT each day. A two-day virtual gathering open to our community, now over 200 organisations strong across more than 72 countries, to listen, share, and recognise one another.

Year one of the festival, in July 2025, taught us that members come to a GSF moment for one another, not for content. The honest stories, the peer reflection, the gratitude circle were the moments members named as the ones that mattered. Year two builds on those threads and sharpens the lens.

This year’s theme is “Connective tissue: trust and the spaces between us.” Trust is everywhere in our work – with partners and governments, within our teams, with the children and communities we serve, with our funders, and with one another. The festival is about the trust that gets built, broken and rebuilt in the work you are already doing.

Agenda

Day one — Honouring the threads

• Welcome to open the festival
• Connection Buffet 2.0: Speed networking with tenure-mixed breakout groups
• Voices that built us: Three Wisdom Keepers tell reflective stories on what staying in this work has taught them
• Meet the GSF lounge that puts faces to projects across our team
• The connections that changed our work: Connective Tissue voices share the small connections through GSF that shifted something in their work

Day two — Holding the spaces between

• A GSF Bingo energiser to open the day
• Trust Under Pressure: Three honest stories of where trust cracked and what the repair looked like
• New Threads: Our space for newer members to share a threshold moment, a first chapter, or an ask the community responds to with offers
• Reflective lounges: Smaller-group conversations on threads that surfaced from Day 1
• The Gratitude Circle: Closing the day by recognising the people who quietly hold this network together

Who is this for?

Every member of our community. CEOs and Founders, programme leads, education specialists, research and operations colleagues. The festival is for the doers and implementers as much as for senior leadership.

What you will leave with?

• New connections across regions, sectors and tenures, including with the GSF team behind the work.
• A clearer picture of the resources, evidence hubs and tools we have built for you across our journey.
• Honest stories of how peers have held trust through change, through scale, through hard pilots.
• A space to bring what you are carrying, and a community that listens with care and responds with collaboration.

Who can join?

GSF Members only

A look back at last year

If you missed our inaugural festival in 2025, or would like to revisit it, we have prepared a short visual recap of the highlights, the stories, the moments, the voices that made it. Please visit the recap here.