2025 Call for Sessions

CALL FOR SESSIONS

Mobilizing and Organizing Philanthropy to Meet the Moment
CHANGE Philanthropy UNITY Summit
Oct 27-30, 2025 • Minneapolis, MN

Deadline to submit session applications:
Friday, May 2, 2025, 11:59 pm Pacific Time

For nearly a decade, the UNITY summit has been a critical space where funders, organizers, and community leaders unite to strengthen our movements, increase investments in our communities, and support the philanthropic sector to meet the moment. We are living through a time that demands bold initiative, deep connection, and unwavering solidarity. The challenges we face are immense, but so is the power we hold when we come together. This is a space where we strategize, build, and strive toward justice.

This year’s summit, taking place October 27–30, 2025, will host nearly 1,500 participants in person in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and another 300 virtually.

We are calling for well-developed, thoughtful session proposals that advance actionable strategies for justice, power-building, and solidarity in philanthropy. Proposals must be focused, concrete, and driven by clear intention.

Given the volume of submissions and limited session slots, final session selections will be competitive. For the 2023 Unity Summit, approximately 30% of submissions were selected.

OUR COLLECTIVE PURPOSE: GUIDING GOALS AND THEMES

Proposed sessions should align with one or more of the three Unity Summit GOALS:

Advance philanthropy grounded in justice and solidarity to build power toward collective liberation.
Amplify intersectional social justice practices in philanthropy that challenge structural and institutional inequities across ability, class, gender, race, and sexual orientation.
Magnify CHANGE partners' community priorities with an intersectional approach.

Sessions should also fit within one or more of these overarching THEMES:

Mobilizing and Power Building
For example:
- Bridging organizing and funding to create structural transformation
- Overcoming paralysis to take concrete action
- How funders can face difficult conversations and drive change
- Building loving solidarity across communities and ideologies
- Defining roles and responsibilities for funders and organizers in this moment

Protecting Our Communities
For example:
- Organizing staff and boards to counter repression and strengthen protections
- Policy and regulation shifts in philanthropy to meet urgent challenges
- Practical models to increase funding for the fight ahead
- Building personal resilience when facing professional risks

Lifting Up What’s Working and What Didn’t Work
For example:
- Lessons from international solidarity movements fighting attacks on civil rights and civil liberties
- Inside/Outside strategies for resistance and advancing justice
- Open conversations about failures and growth
- Tactical case studies: what was effective, what mistakes can we learn from

WHAT WE’RE LOOKING FOR: CONTENT & SKILL-BUILDING

We welcome a broad range of issue-focused proposals across varied bodies of content. We especially value approaches that push beyond symbolic allyship and instead promote authentic shifts in power and resources, structural transformations, and intersectional solidarity around shared goals and material change.

We are particularly interested the following areas:

Protecting Our Communities
Counter-Narratives and Narrative Change
Cross-Sector Collaborations
Cultural Wedges: Resisting Scapegoating and Defending Targeted Communities
Healing and Restoration Practices
Intersectional Solidarity
Liberatory Leadership
Multiracial Democracy
Mutual Aid and Community Resilience Networks
Place-Based Organizing
Transformative and/or Restorative Justice

Proposals outside this list are still encouraged if they align with our Summit goals and overarching themes.

Sessions should build practical skills, equip participants with tools, and offer actionable strategies & tactics they can put into practice as soon as they step out of the room. Proposals must explicitly answer: How does your session skill up participants to meet this moment?

OUR CONSTITUENCIES

CHANGE Philanthropy has always uplifted those who have been historically excluded from philanthropic decision-making. Today, our same communities are most under attack. While not an exhaustive list, these communities are front and center in our collective fight for justice, and must shape philanthropy’s future:

Black, Indigenous, Latine, Asian American, Native Hawaiian, Pacific Islander communities
Immigrants, migrants, and refugees
Low-income communities
People with disabilities
People living in rural communities
Queer, lesbian, gay, bisexual, pansexual, asexual and other marginalized sexual orientations
Trans, non-binary, intersex, gender-expansive and gender-nonconforming people
Women and femmes

We also encourage proposals that highlight communities outside of this list, as long as the content of the session aligns with our Summit goals and overarching themes. All sessions can be specific to a particular community and should offer insights applicable to all participants.

HOW TO STRUCTURE YOUR SESSION

At the 2023 Unity Summit, one out of every two participants was a newcomer, reminding us that the Summit draws people at all stages of their journey toward justice. We seek sessions that cater both to those taking their first steps and to those already deeply engaged in the work. To that end, session proposals must clearly identify their intended audience:

For those new to resisting injustice and fighting for justice: Sessions that help participants understand what’s at stake and help them make the case for their organizations to take action.
For those already engaged: Strategy and action-focused sessions for funders and organizers already mobilizing and advancing intersectional social justice

In addition, session proposals must:

Specify their desired format: In-person or virtual

Align with one of two primary approaches:
- Internal Organizational Practice: Strategies for shifting philanthropic culture and climate
- External Practice: Leveraging capital, engaging communities with accountability, and building collective power

A potential speaker can be listed on multiple proposals. However, we ask that each individual present in only one breakout session. If multiple proposals featuring the same speaker are selected for the Unity Summit, the speaker will be asked to choose which one breakout session they would like to present in. An individual may still be selected for both a breakout session and a plenary session if invited.

WHAT WE ARE NOT SEEKING

To maintain focus, we are not seeking sessions that:

Lack a clear connection to moving philanthropic resources towards power-building
Are broad overviews rather than deep, focused explorations
Revisit strategies that are already well-documented without providing actionable solutions for increasing their adoption or adapting them to today’s urgent challenges
Do not provide participants with concrete, actionable takeaways
Lack concrete tools and suggestions for mobilizing funders to take action

SUBMISSION DETAILS

Submission Deadline: Friday, May 2, 2025, 11:59 pm Pacific Time
Final session selections will be competitive due to limited availability. For the 2023 Unity Summit, approximately 30% of submissions were selected.
You can preview the questions before submitting your proposal via our Submission Form Overview.
The official proposal form is hosted on JotForm. While JotForm lets you log in and save your progress to return later, we strongly recommend drafting your answers in a separate document beforehand for a smoother process. Once you’re ready, you can copy and paste your responses into JotForm and submit the form in one sitting.

We are excited for you to share your knowledge, strategies, and vision. Sessions should be well-thought-out and aligned with the considerations stated above, though we recognize that details may evolve. If selected, you will have a chance to finalize your session description before we launch our event platform a few weeks before the Summit.

For more information on Sessions:

Please visit the Call For Sessions - Frequently Asked Questions page

For technical questions about the form or issues with the Call For Sessions submission site:

Contact programming (at) conveningtowardliberation (dot) com

For content-related questions:

Contact unitysummit (at) changephilanthropy (dot) org

SUBMIT A PROPOSAL