A STAKE IN THE FUTURE: BUILDING TRUST THROUGH ACTION
December 22, 2025
In a recent feature in Forbes I discussed something I’ve long believed: when people don’t feel like stakeholders in the economy, they stop acting like stewards of it. Today, too many feel like they’re merely renting their place in the system—without a real stake in the future.
This disillusionment is visible all around us—in declining optimism, rising disengagement, and deepening distrust of our institutions. And it’s not imagined—inequality is accelerating, employee engagement is falling, and partisan divisions are straining our social fabric.
Yet I remain deeply optimistic. And that optimism is rooted in this community. Every day, I see businesses challenging the status quo and showing the world that capitalism can evolve. Companies that are doing well by doing right. Investors that are pursuing both financial returns and positive societal impact. They aren’t anomalies. They’re blueprints for Inclusive Capitalism.
As the Forbes feature notes, we are a community of action: “Less a think tank than an operating table, the Council is where Fortune 100 executives, major investors, and faith leaders come together not just to talk, but to act.”
The work of building an inclusive and sustainable economy isn’t easy, and we never thought it would be. There is no single prescription or regulation that could reform the system alone. Change comes through sustained collaborative effort as demonstrated by the Council’s work and accomplishments of our members in 2025 that I am proud to highlight in this newsletter.
The Council is powered by leaders like you—those who believe that long-term business success is only possible when people and planet thrive as well. As we close this year and look ahead to the next, I’m grateful for each of you walking this path with us.
Wishing you a joyful and blessed New Year,
Lynn Forester de Rothschild
Founder and CEO
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Reflections on 2025
As 2025 draws to a close, we reflect on a year defined by both global uncertainty and urgent progress. The Council for Inclusive Capitalism and our global partners remained focused on translating moral conviction into practical, system-level change.
Below, we revisit the most significant insights, reports, and conversations that shaped the movement for a more inclusive, sustainable, and trusted economy in 2025.
Lynn Forester de Rothschild honors the legacy of Pope Francis, whose moral clarity and urgent call for inclusive progress were the profound inspiration for founding the Council for Inclusive Capitalism. She affirms that capitalism must be stewarded by responsible leaders to ensure it serves the common good—creating value, dignified work, and community prosperity alongside fair shareholder returns. The greatest tribute to his vision, outlined in encyclicals like Laudato Si’, is to carry forward his call to action by building an economy where profit and purpose are not at odds.
“An inclusive capitalism that leaves no one behind, that discards none of our brothers or sisters, is a noble aspiration, worthy of your best efforts.”
— Pope Francis, 2019
Convened at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) headquarters, the Council’s 2025 Steering Committee meeting addressed the “New Reality” of economic volatility, technological shifts, and social discontent. Co-hosted by Christine Lagarde (European Central Bank) and Mathias Cormann (OECD), the discussion centered on how private sector leadership can ensure decisions lead to more inclusive outcomes and stable societies.
The Council’s 2025 Climate Week convening explored how AI, while promising immense growth, poses the significant risk of deepening inequality and displacing workers if not managed inclusively. Leaders agreed that a workforce-centered transition is vital, calling for responsible innovation, corporate accountability, and pre-distribution mechanisms.
The Taskforce on Inequality and Social-related Financial Disclosures (TISFD) began 2025 by announcing its Steering Committee of 25 senior leaders to guide the development of a global framework for financial disclosures focused on people. To ensure global relevance and system interoperability, TISFD then expanded its collaboration by joining the Impact Management Platform and launching four Regional Councils (Americas, Asia-Pacific, Europe & UK, and Middle East & Africa) for local co-creation and engagement. It also established a multi-disciplinary group of advisors, including TNFD, GRI, EFRAG, MSCI ESG Research and others, as Knowledge Partners to ensure its recommendations are market-usable and evidence-based. This extensive preparatory activity led to the release of its “Conceptual Foundations” discussion paper, which establishes the key terms, definitions, and concepts necessary to build the forthcoming social and inequality-related disclosure framework – a beta version of which will be released by TISFD in mid-2026.
Lynn Forester de Rothschild examines the critical need to rebalance the American economy between markets and labor to support working-class voters. The article proposes four key policy recommendations to revitalize the workforce: eliminating federal tax for families earning below the poverty line, investing in portable skills training, expanding employee ownership programs (ESOPs), and developing a national, worker-centric AI strategy. This approach offers a roadmap for implementing structural, pro-worker economic reforms to restore opportunity.
Justin Adams has spent decades working at the intersection of business, finance, and environmental stewardship. Now, as the inaugural CBA Sir Evelyn de Rothschild Fellow for Reimagining Nature Finance and Inclusive Capitalism, he’s exploring how nature finance can be redesigned to serve both people and planet. In this featured article, Justin shares powerful insights on the limits of current markets, the need to shift power and capital toward regenerative solutions, and the bold thinking required to build a nature-positive, inclusive economy.
Tribal nations have long been stewards of forests, wetlands, and grasslands—yet many have been excluded from the financial benefits of carbon markets. The National Indian Carbon Coalition (NICC) is changing that by ensuring that tribes retain full ownership and control over their carbon projects, allowing them to reinvest in conservation, infrastructure, and economic resilience. From funding new schools to reclaiming ancestral lands, NICC is proving that carbon finance can be a tool for justice, not just offsetting emissions.
Addressing a $223 billion global insurance gap, this piece details how parametric insurance offers a transformative solution for financial inclusion and climate resilience among vulnerable low-income workers. The Self Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) in India successfully piloted a microinsurance scheme where payouts, triggered by pre-defined climate events like extreme heat, provide fast liquidity to over 225,000 members.
Temasek is a global investment company headquartered in Singapore and a Steering Committee member of the Council for Inclusive Capitalism, with a S$389 billion (US$288 billion) portfolio as of March 31, 2024. A Purpose-driven organisation, its Purpose – “So Every Generation Prospers” – reflects its aspiration to help every generation thrive by empowering the well-being of people, portfolio companies, partners, communities, and the planet we share. Sustainability is a core pillar of Temasek’s strategy, embedded in everything it does—from delivering sustainable long-term returns to shaping its portfolio and engaging companies to build sustainable businesses.
This piece, featuring Offploy, makes the case for inclusive hiring of people with criminal convictions as a smart, values-driven business strategy. Offploy argues that challenging workplace exclusion reduces reoffending, strengthens teams, and delivers real social impact, embodying Inclusive Capitalism in action. The organization offers free, practical tools—the Disclosure Toolkit and the Inclusive Employment Scorecard—to help employers navigate complex laws and assess their readiness for fair chance hiring.
The conversation, featuring Council Founder & CEO Lynn Forester de Rothschild and Tony Elumelu, addresses the urgency of evolving the capitalist system to reduce global inequality. It highlights the powerful, natural synergy between the Council’s philosophy of Inclusive Capitalism and Elumelu’s Africapitalism, demonstrating a unified global approach to ensuring businesses champion both profit and purpose.
Building on work launched in 2024, the Council deepened its partnership with BCG and WBCSD to ensure that the rapidly expanding field of transition finance meaningfully incorporates the “just” dimension. Throughout 2025, the Council co-hosted high-level practitioner workshops at London Climate Week, New York Climate Week, and COP30, bringing together global banks, investors, MDBs, corporates, philanthropic and catalytic capital providers, and civil society. Across these convenings, a clear message emerged: capital must support not only decarbonization and nature action but also the people and communities most affected by the transition. By working to align definitions, expectations, and emerging practices, the Council advanced convergence on how financial institutions can deploy capital in ways that accelerate climate ambition while ensuring fairness, opportunity, and shared prosperity.
The Key To Unlocking Private Climate Finance
In her latest Project Syndicate op-ed, Lynn Forester de Rothschild argues that unlocking the trillions in private climate finance requires two essentials: policy certainty and a focus on people.
Policy instability raises risk and slows the innovation and investment needed to scale clean-energy solutions. But the deeper barrier, she writes, is that global climate efforts have too often overlooked the workers, consumers, and communities most affected by the transition. Without public trust and shared purpose, private capital will not move at the pace required.
Lynn calls for coherent national strategies that align governments, investors, and civil society — turning climate pledges into progress that protects both people and planet.
Just Transition Microsite
Companies and investors working to put people at the center of their climate strategies can tap into our Just Transition microsite — a centralized resource designed to bring greater convergence across the growing landscape of Just Transition guidance, expectations, and emerging practices.
The hub features:
- The Just Transition Framework, developed with leading companies and investors, to help align language, principles, and expectations across sectors
- Practical guidance for aligning capital allocation with community and workforce needs in ways that reflect shared priorities across business, finance, philanthropy, and civil society
- Case studies and insights from across our community that highlight where stakeholders are beginning to coalesce around common approaches
- The latest research, tools, and examples of people-centered climate action that advance convergence across the field, including:
- Thomson Reuters Foundation’s “Navigating the Just Transition: Context, Conflicts and Company Practice”
- UNFCC’s “Just transitions in national climate frameworks and climate policies: Experiences in alignment, planning and progress tracking”
- WBA’s “Assessing the ‘Just’ in Corporate Transition Plans: Framework and Guidance”
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