An Evening with Báyò Akómoláfé: What the Earth Is Teaching Us About Change

Important update: Due to visa delays, Báyò will now join us virtually for the fireside conversation and live audience Q&A. The event will still take place in person as planned, with live facilitation by CSI's CEO Tonya Surman. We’re looking forward to an evening of thoughtful conversation, connection, and community.

From time to time, a voice emerges that helps us see the world differently. Not by offering easy answers, but by inviting us to pause, listen, and reconsider the stories we tell about change, progress, and our place within the living world.

For many people working at the edges of climate action, social innovation, new economic thinking, and cultural transformation, Dr. Báyò Akómoláfé has become one of those voices. His work is poetic, provocative, and deeply grounding. Rather than urging us to move faster or work harder to fix the world, Báyò asks a more unsettling and generative question: What if the transformations we seek require us to ‘slow down’, and learn anew from a world migrating from the conveniences of systemic legibility?

On May 13, we have a rare opportunity to gather at the Centre for Social Innovation (CSI) for an evening of reflection and conversation with Báyò as we explore what it might mean to navigate this moment of planetary transition with humility, imagination, and care.

Talk & Fireside Conversation: What the Earth Is Teaching Us About Change (SOLD OUT)
Learning to navigate planetary transition with Báyò Akómoláfé
7:00 PM, Ground Floor Atrium (SOLD OUT) or Livestream ($10)

Following an opening talk from Báyò, we will move into a fireside conversation exploring questions many people are holding right now:

• How do we navigate a time when old systems are clearly breaking down?
• What might it mean to learn from the more-than-human world — from forests, rivers, soil, and living ecosystems — as we imagine new futures?
• How might our approaches to change evolve if we moved beyond urgency and certainty toward deeper forms of listening and relationship?

At a time when many people are searching for deeper ways of understanding change, this evening offers a rare opportunity to encounter ideas that challenge, inspire, and open new possibilities.

Whether you work in climate action, social innovation, philanthropy, the arts, or simply feel the need for new ways of thinking about the future, we invite you to join us for this unique evening of conversation.


Viewing Experience & Small Group Conversations: What the Earth Is Teaching Us About Change
Watch the talk on screen, followed by in-person small group discussions with Báyò
7:00 PM, Suite 101, $40

As the Atrium reaches capacity, we’re opening a more intimate way to be part of the evening so that more people can be a part of it.

Join us in a smaller shared space to watch Báyò’s opening talk via livestream, followed by in-person small group conversations with Báyò himself. This format offers a different kind of proximity, not just to the ideas, but to one another.

If you’re drawn to reflection, dialogue, and a more relational experience, this is a beautiful way to engage with the themes of the evening in a quieter, more personal setting.


Private Dinner: Beyond Fixing the World (SOLD OUT)
A private dinner with Báyò Akómoláfé on generosity, uncertainty, and supporting transformation
Co-presented by Coralus
5:00 PM, CCFE Solutions Salon (Suite 501), $175

The most thoughtful philanthropists we know are asking a version of the same question: in a moment of such profound uncertainty, how do we give in ways that are genuinely generative and not just effective by yesterday's measures?

Báyò brings a rare perspective to that question. Drawing on Yoruba traditions of reciprocity and his own work at the edges of ecology and philosophy, he invites us to consider what happens when we make room alongside our strategic giving for something less prescribed. Resources directed not only toward solutions, but toward the conditions where unexpected, transformative things can take root.

This intimate dinner, limited to 30 guests, is a chance to explore those ideas with peers who are asking similar questions.

Who is Báyò Akómoláfé?

Dr. Báyò Akómoláfé is a Nigerian-born philosopher, psychologist, writer, and public intellectual whose work is reshaping how many people think about change and our place within the living world. Drawing from Yoruba cosmology, ecology, and posthumanist philosophy, Báyò invites us to reconsider a simple but profound idea: Humans are not the central actors in the story of the world.

We are participants in a vast web of relationships with animals, rivers, soil, weather, microbes, and forces far older than our institutions and national boundaries. In Báyò’s work, these “more-than-human worlds” are not poetic metaphors but living realities — reminders that the systems we are trying to fix are deeply entangled with the ecological systems that sustain life.

He also explores the idea of “postactivism,” a gentle but provocative questioning of conventional activism. What if our constant urgency to fix things sometimes reproduces the very conditions we are trying to change? What if slowing down, sitting with uncertainty, and listening more deeply to the world around us might be just as radical as organizing or innovating?

Báyò is the founder of The Emergence Network, author of These Wilds Beyond Our Fences, and has taught at institutions including Middlebury College, Schumacher College, and UC Berkeley’s Othering & Belonging Institute. He is the Hubert H. Humphrey Distinguished Professor of American Studies at Macalester College (USA), the Inaugural W.E.B. Du Bois Scholar in Residence at the Schumacher Center for a New Economics (USA), the Distinguished Fellow of Instituto Toriba (Brazil), an Ambassador for the Wellbeing Economy Alliance and a member of the Club of Rome.

Across his work runs a consistent thread: exploring what it means to build cultures, economies, and communities oriented toward life rather than growth alone.

This event is made possible thanks to the support of our partners TGC, Canadian Centre for Food & Ecology (CCFE), Coralus, and more.

Please note, tickets are non-refundable.