Global Donut Days 2025 in Berlin - "We go deeper"

For the Global Donut Days 2025 we hosted an event at and with the Atelier Gardens in Berlin, together with our partner organisations re:finn and Karma Capital Group. More than 100 guests attended, all working, in different ways, on reshaping our economic system, with backgrounds ranging from academia, social entrepreneurship, public administration, NGOs and civil society.  

The evening's title, "Wir gehen tiefer" ("We go deeper"), captured our central ambition: to move past the visible symptoms of today's ecological and social crises and instead confront the deeper, unconscious economic beliefs that sustain them. These beliefs shape mainstream narratives of success and progress, legitimise the externalisation of ecological and social costs, and quietly foreclose alternative ways of thinking. Our aim was to make these usually invisible foundations of economic thought tangible and open to revision — sharpening participants' mental images of a fairer, more regenerative way of living, and making pathways toward regenerative economies experientially accessible. The premise: human imagination can be just as powerful a force as economic reality itself.

The evening unfolded in two connected parts:

1. We created an interactive exhibit and hosted small circles of exchange about the subconscious assumptions that shape today's economy. We invited participants to actively rewrite them. We prepared questions and distributed postcards so they could multiply the method in their specific contexts.
2. In our "Donut Bowl" - a Fishbowl-style panel discussion - at first founders and changemakers from Karma Capital Group, FEMNA Health, RECUP, Acker e.V., S.E.N.D. e.V., Regenerative Economy Hub and the social space Malzfabrik shared personal stories of "unlearning" ingrained economic convictions, and the paths that led them toward more regenerative ways of doing business and work for social change. Then they left their seats in the middle of the Donut to make room for everyone else who wanted to share their questions, ideas, stories. Thus we heard a constant and rich flow of perspectives and an ongoing conversation between ever new people.

Participant Beth Gohl-Greenaway brilliantly summarized the questions and themes discussed:

• Does growth need to be infinite to be meaningful? Panelists argued that growth-independence, not endless accumulation, should guide business models. Wealth, once created, can instead be reinvested in democracy, sustainability, and social impact.
• What does ownership actually mean? Several speakers described a shift from extractive ownership toward steward ownership, where ownership implies responsibility rather than a right to extract, including experiments with steward-owned real estate and the broader case for nature's rights.
• Is competition really "everything"? Multiple contributors questioned the primacy of competition, pointing instead to cooperation as a source of meaning and collective strength, even where this means, in practice, lower salaries but greater purpose and responsibility.
• Who gets to lead? The panel challenged traditional stereotypes of leadership and founder identity, highlighting alternative, feminist, or more intuitive paths into entrepreneurship that create space for different voices.
• How do we reconnect with nature? Speakers linked ecological reconnection not only to environmental outcomes but to human and planetary health, more nutritious food systems, and improved mental wellbeing.
  
  

A further question, raised during the Donut Bowl and echoed afterward by organizing partner Nikolas Klein from Karma Capital, framed the evening's deeper inquiry: What would a genuinely good life for everyone, within planetary boundaries, actually look like? Doughnut Economics does not claim to know whether economic growth can be fully decoupled from environmental harm. Instead, it proposes transforming organisations, institutions, and systems to become growth-agnostic, so that meeting everyone's needs and protecting the living world no longer depend on continual expansion. This was illustrated through the concept of Systemic Investing — exemplified by Karma Capital's Steward Ownership Fund, which channels capital toward mission-driven, steward-owned ventures without forcing them into hyper-growth or exit-driven trajectories.

Conclusion

The Global Donut Days 2025 evening at Atelier Gardens succeeded in doing what its title promised: going deeper than surface-level fixes, toward the belief systems that underpin today's economic mainstream. Through the combination of a personal, story-driven Donut Bowl discussion and a hands-on, participatory installation, the event offered attendees both an intellectual and an experiential route into rethinking growth, ownership, competition, leadership, and humanity's relationship with nature.

What emerged was less a set of finished answers than a shared sense of possibility: that solutions and working models for a regenerative economy already exist, that unlearning old convictions is an ongoing, collective process, and that alliances across sectors - science, enterprise, administration, NGOs and civil society - are essential to carrying that process forward. As one attendee put it, 

The evening's invitation was not simply to think about the economy differently, but to begin living it differently. 

We could not have hoped for a better outcome!