2025 Recap: From Amsterdam to the World

In 2025, we kept coming back to a simple idea: meaningful change starts close to home, and scales through collaboration. That’s why we’re looking back on the year through three lenses: what we built locally in Amsterdam, what we advanced nationally, and how we contributed globally. Because in a network of 130+ Impact Hubs we’re happy to be locally rooted and globally connected.

Local: Amsterdam

Amsterdam is where we do a lot of our work. It’s where ideas become reality, where partnerships get tested, and where progress becomes visible. This year we continued the direction we already conceptualized in 2019 (still a nice read: Building a City Ecosystem for Impact): strengthening the city’s impact ecosystem together with a whole array of different partners across the city.

This goal came to live through a multitude of programs we ran for pioneers that are building solutions for a better future. Examples are 1) Operators for Impact, where we match weathered entrepreneurs (operators) to impact businesses in need of practical support for a 6 month collaboration, and 2) Boost je Buurt, now up for its 4th edition, a program for initiatives rooted in Amsterdam’s neighbourhoods places where impact is not a slide deck, but something people actually feel. These programs are in proud collaboration with the City of Amsterdam.

Hard to miss, we also made a literal move. Impact Hub Amsterdam relocated to the Marineterrein in the city center. Together with our neighbours of AMS Institute we conceptualized and opened CRCL PARK: a shared space to make circular and regenerative innovation easier. A place where everyone interested in the topic can meet, test, and grow, and fun side-note: even the King and Queen of The Netherlands visited us already.

National: From “we should” to “we did”.

Across the Netherlands, our focus was on the messy middle of change: aligning stakeholders, building partnerships that last, and translating ambitions into delivery.

We also participated in creating the narrative: not as an end in itself, but as a way to give good and highly necessary work more exposure. Together with The Green Times and We Are The Regeneration, we co-created the video campaign Ondernemen voor het Leven, spotlighting five entrepreneurs building regenerative models and making those examples easier to find, share, and learn from.

A lot of national progress also lives inside value chains, where circularity stops being a concept and becomes a material decision. This year we worked on topics like crashpads for climbing gyms and stonepaper value chain management, because if we want circular outcomes, we need circular inputs, procurement choices, and business cases that make sense.

We also worked with national players in construction and infrastructure, like the innovation teams of Dura Vermeer and OMDUS. And hosted national programs that bring entrepreneurs, partners, and support together, like our Food Chain Accelerator program, scouting for the Fair Future Challenge 2025, and multiple CIRCO tracks (such as the CIRCO PV Transformer track) for SMEs across the Netherlands.

Global: connecting the dots across borders

Global work, for us, is less about “being everywhere” and more about linking the right people, lessons, and opportunities so solutions travel faster.

In 2025, we worked closely with the Impact Hub network and other Impact Hub’s across the globe such as Vienna, Madrid, Shanghai, Antwerp, Dresden, Taipei, and more. In June we connected with teams from many other Impact Hubs in the Global Gathering in beautiful Armenia.

One concrete example of a global collaboration was the EU-funded Green at Heart project: where we supported SMEs across Europe with practical ESG and circularity tools, webinars and hands-on guidance, helping them move from assessment to action plans, with 62 SMEs getting selected for micro-grants of up to EUR 8,000 to stimulate their sustainability initiatives.

We’re also quite proud of our work with the NatAlli project, which helps empower Ukrainian women in times of crises, by training their mentors, for whom we translated our experience into practical support and tools in the NatAlli toolkit. You can still sign up to the platform as a mentor or a mentee!

Alongside that, we spent time scouting, matching and exploring collaboration with global players such as the Tencent CarbonX program, the Bayer Foundation Women Entrepreneurs Award, and IKEA. Some of this work stays behind the scenes, but the intent is simple: create openings that help impact- solutions and impact-ecosystems access partners, and resources that would otherwise remain out of reach.

If 2025 reconfirmed one thing for us, it would be that 1) ecosystems are built through consistency, and collaboration, 2) execution is still the bottleneck: ideas are not scarce, aligned action is, and 3) community works best when there’s real infrastructure around it: programs that support people, and places that make collaboration easier.

Our plans for 2026?

In the new year, we’ll be sharing more about our plans for 2026, including new opportunities to join, partner, pilot, and scale. So stay close; we’ll announce the next steps soon (by subscribing to our newsletter for example!).

In the meantime, on behalf of the Impact Hub Amsterdam team, we’d like to wish you a warm and restful end of the year, and a bright start to 2026!