Celebrating 2025’s resilience through adversity and looking ahead : )
On behalf of SVT’s team, we wish you a glorious new year!!
While it is still clearly in view, we wanted to briefly reflect on the past year and express gratitude for all the learnings, opportunities, and human connections we had the chance to nurture and grow.
It has been an intense year for many of us across the country. Through all the change and turmoil, we have witnessed admirable unity between different groups, and a collective will to redefine and innovate to meet the moment. We expect this upcoming year to bring continued disruption and transformation, and we are blessed to have partners, colleagues, friends and family to walk this uncharted path with.
Special mention to our dear colleague Aaron Mallett, our impact analyst Laura Moore, our new growth hacker Richard Muscat, our thought partner Alvin Lumanlan, and our talented summer interns Alex Lin + Olma Wakjira for all the enrichment and contributions they’ve offered over the course of the year and beyond.
Some highlights from 2025 include :
Provided impact measurement, management, and capacity building to Rethink Ireland and Techstars Workforce Development Accelerator, each of whose portfolio enterprises is building the capability of innovative organizations to make a measurable difference in the lives of people the mainstream economy leaves behind.
Assessed the impact on wellbeing of Happiness Capital, the corporate VC of LKK Group. We also produced a technical guide to the open-source Happiness Return Framework including a drilldown on the alternative proteins industry, which helped us improve the rigor and consistency of our analysis of the various impacts on wellbeing that portfolio companies in that space create. We traveled to Japan to celebrate five years of this collaboration with Happiness Capital’s team, portfolio, investors, and advisors including our longtime mentor Jed Emerson.
Continued work with our RIDER colleagues (Rural Innovation Driving Equitable Resilience), a network working to halve child poverty by addressing system conditions that perpetuate it. Through this effort we learned a ton about the use of AI to enable even leaders in the most remote places to access world-class data analytics and communications design, support peer connection and stakeholder engagement, and enable the type of connection that can only be done in person. Our joint efforts with the five rural site leaders thus far were punctuated by a visit to Upper Cumberland, Tennessee and capped by our third annual in-person convening in New York City for the Federal Reserve Bank’s Making Missing Markets initiative.
Another highlight was our SVT team retreat in the gorgeous state of Minnesota. The setting was suffused with wildfire smoke from upwind climate change-enlarged fires, and was a compelling and inspiring opportunity for us to reflect on SVT’s 25 year journey and solidify our strategy and vision for the next 25.
Lastly, to ready for SVT’s next era, we have refreshed our visual identity and website. We will keep adding and refining content throughout this new year so do let us know at info@svtgroup.net (or over LinkedIn dms) if you have any comments or improvement suggestions.
We are eager to continue growing our clients’ impact as well as our field building work. Please get in touch with us if you’d like to collaborate with us in this new year.
We wish you the utmost success and prosperity,
SVT Group’s team
