November 12-13, 2026 | Los Angeles, California
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The annual gathering for people using media, arts, and entertainment to shape culture and drive social change.
Over one and a half days, Impact Guild members and invited leaders come together across disciplines to build relationships, exchange ideas, find collaborators, and imagine what comes next.
Registration is now open. Only active members of Impact Guild may attend.
Registration closes at 5:00 p.m. PT on Thursday, November 5, 2026.
Impact Guild Forum is designed exclusively for Guild members and invited guests. If you’re not yet a member, please apply here by 5:00 p.m. PT on Thursday, October 22, 2026 in order to attend.
IMAGINE FORWARD
The systems that shape culture are being rewritten. What should we build next?
The ways culture is created, financed, distributed, discovered, and experienced are changing simultaneously.
Content is becoming abundant while human attention remains scarce. Audiences increasingly expect participation, community, and experiences alongside consumption. The boundaries among traditional media forms are dissolving. And the financial systems that determine which stories get made are struggling to keep pace.
Forum 2026 asks not simply where media is going, but what future we want to build.
Across film and television, video games, music, podcasts and audio, journalism, publishing, performing arts, creator media, XR, and immersive experiences, Imagine Forward will explore three forces reshaping the cultural landscape.
ATTENTION
How do meaningful stories find people when everything is content?
As audiences fragment across platforms, algorithms, communities, and formats, we’ll explore what earns attention, creates trust, and builds lasting relationships between storytellers and audiences.
EXPERIENCE
What changes when audiences become participants?
From games and immersive storytelling to live performance, fandom, location-based entertainment, and community, we’ll examine the growing value of experiences people can enter, shape, share, and remember.
CAPITAL
What new financing systems will determine what gets made?
As traditional models strain, we’ll bring philanthropy, commercial investment, brands, platforms, creators, and emerging financial models into conversation about the capital infrastructure the next generation of culture requires.
Imagine Forward is an invitation to move beyond predicting the future—and begin building it.
PLAN YOUR TRAVEL
One and a half days in Los Angeles
The detailed Forum agenda and featured participants will be announced in the weeks ahead. For now, please plan to participate during the following blocks:
THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 12 | 3:30–8:00 PM | Chapter House, Historic Filipinotown
Late Morning to Early Afternoon
Organized Group Activity (Thursday, November 12; Morning, time TBD; additional cost to attend)
3:30–6:00 PM
Welcome Reception & Member Town Hall
6:00–8:00 PM
Peer Group Happy Hours & Dinners
FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 13 | 9:00 AM–8:00 PM | UTA, Beverly Hills
A full day of mainstage conversations, participatory breakout sessions, networking, and the Forum’s closing celebration:
9:00-11:30 AM
Registration/Morning Plenary
11:30 AM-1:00 PM
Morning Breakout Sessions
1:00-2:00 PM
Networking Lunch
2:00-3:30 PM
Afternoon Breakout Sessions
3:30–5:00 PM
Afternoon Plenary
5:30-8:00 PM
Farewell Reception
Programming and locations are subject to change. A detailed agenda will be shared with registered attendees.
TRAVEL GUIDANCE: Attendees should plan to be in Los Angeles by Thursday at noon for the Welcome Reception and depart on a red eye Friday night if they wish to participate in the full Forum experience.
A DIFFERENT KIND OF CONVENING
Come with your work, your questions, and your expertise.
Forum is Impact Guild’s flagship annual gathering, but it isn’t designed around passive audiences.
The people in the room are part of the program.
Mainstage conversations bring shared focus to emerging ideas and challenges. Participatory breakouts begin with expert perspectives before opening into active discussion, ideation, and problem-solving. Peer Groups and Affinity Groups create spaces for deeper exchange. Structured matchmaking helps people find the collaborators, expertise, and resources their work needs.
And meals, receptions, performances, and the spaces between sessions create time for relationships to form naturally.
MAINSTAGE CONVERSATIONS
Featured voices and cross-disciplinary conversations bring the full Forum community together around ideas shaping the future of culture.
PARTICIPATORY BREAKOUTS
Expert-led working sessions designed for dialogue, ideation, problem-solving, and exchange—not panels for panels’ sake.
PEER & AFFINITY GROUPS
Dedicated spaces to connect around shared professional practices, identities, interests, and areas of impact.
MATCHMAKING
Intentional introductions designed to turn the breadth of the Impact Guild network into useful relationships.
ART & PERFORMANCE
Creative work woven throughout Forum reflects the breadth of storytelling forms represented within the Guild.
SOCIAL PROGRAMMING
Meals, receptions, and informal gatherings create the space where conversations continue and collaborations often begin.
WHO’S IN THE ROOM?
A cultural ecosystem that rarely occupies the same room.
Impact Guild brings together creators and producers, artists and designers, executives and industry leaders, strategists and campaign designers, researchers and academics, funders and investors, and other practitioners using culture to contribute to the common good.
They work across film and television, video games, music, podcasts and audio, journalism, publishing, performing arts, creator and social media, XR and immersive experiences, philanthropy, investment, research, and impact strategy.
The point isn’t simply to put different disciplines next to one another. It’s to create the conditions for them to work together.
THE FORUM IN ACTION
What happened in 2025
More than 150 senior executives, creators, funders, and cultural leaders gathered in Beverly Hills for Impact Guild Forum 2025. Together, they explored artificial intelligence and the creative economy; narrative power and democracy; the changing media ecosystem; measuring narrative change; the future of philanthropy; civic literacy; polarization; and worldbuilding hopeful futures.
Working sessions went deeper through Affinity Group Labs, collaborative design sprints, structured matchmaking, and cross-sector problem-solving.
JOIN US IN THE ROOM
Collaborators, not just contacts.
Real conversations, not just panels.
Momentum, not just inspiration.
Impact Guild Forum is where the network becomes tangible: where ideas meet expertise, creators meet resources, and people who should know one another finally do.
Impact Guild Forum 2026: Imagine Forward
November 12–13 | Los Angeles, California
Space is limited. Please register by 5:00 p.m. on Thursday, November 5th
