29/07/2025
The Good Lobby Summer Academy is a unique event gathering a select group of leading thinkers, practitioners, and academics working internationally on new forms and politics of influence, mobilisation and lobbying.
Discover the insights from Oana Iordachescu, Founder of Fair Cultures on the 2025 edition of the Summer Academy
What happens when you put 40+ activists, policy nerds, movement-builders, and change-makers in one room for four days?
You test.
You reflect.
You listen.
And if you’re lucky, you walk away not with answers, but with better questions.
I just returned from an immersive program that gathered people from across Europe and beyond to explore the mechanics of power, advocacy, and systems change. No slogans. No quick wins. Just deep, often uncomfortable conversations about what it really takes to drive long-term impact in today’s fragmented, distracted, and sometimes hostile world.
As someone who’s spent the last 15+ years working across DEI, talent, and leadership strategy, first in big tech, now through my own companies, this experience landed differently.
Because right now, we’re watching institutions pull back. Reforms slow. Trust unravel. Words like “inclusion” and “equity” are treated as risky. And yet, there’s momentum, too. Quiet, sometimes fragile. But it’s there.
And this is what I took from these days:
– Narratives are not just stories; they’re structures.
– People don’t act on values. They act on identity, arguments and aesthetics.
– Emotion is the new currency.
– We need more invitational leadership, less performance, more participation.
– Belonging doesn’t scale by size. It scales by spread.
I’ve met people I want to build with. Ideas I want to wrestle with. And I’m returning to my work – whether that’s inclusion consulting, talent strategy, or organising at the edge of deep tech – with sharper questions and a renewed sense of urgency in my mission – access to opportunity, inclusion and fairness at work.
We’re planting a few seeds from this experience into upcoming projects at Fair Cultures, Deep Tech Recruitment, and beyond.
More on that soon.
Until then – what’s your invitational force?
What conversation are you opening up?