SEPTEMBER 21, 2026  |  3 minute read

Meet Our 2026-27 Global Fellows

Impact United Academy is delighted to welcome two extraordinary leaders, Hanae Bezad and Tracey Robertson, as our inaugural Global Fellows for 2026-27.

At a time when Canada’s international relationships are more important than ever, our Global Fellows will build bridges and strengthen our connections with peers and partners from around the world to share leading practices and knowledge, showcase Canadian leadership and expertise, and advance collaboration and collective action. The learnings and outcomes from these global relationships will ultimately serve and benefit our community of investors and asset owners in Canada in mobilizing all forms of capital for positive impact.

This Global Fellowship program is inspired by, and builds on, our Co-Executive Director Michelle Baldwin’s recent Community Collaboration Fellowship with Community Foundations Australia and Huron University College. That experience formed the basis for further knowledge sharing with the Community Foundations of Aotearoa New Zealand at their 2026 Conference that took place just last week.

Meet the Fellows

Hanae Bezad is an impact entrepreneur, investor, international project manager, board advisor, curator, and author of Being Other, a personal reflection on culture, gender, and identity. Her work sits at the intersection of capital, strategy, innovation, culture, and systems change, supporting initiatives that seek to align resources, institutions, and execution toward more regenerative and forward-looking futures.

Her multidisciplinary experience spans government and international development institutions, entrepreneurship and innovation ecosystems, civil society, and the private sector, with work across North America, Europe, Africa, the SWANA region, Asia, and Latin America. Her approach is rooted in the belief that meaningful systems change requires not only capital and innovation, but also cultural intelligence, relational trust, long-term thinking, and the capacity to navigate complexity across sectors, geographies, and worldviews.

Hanae’s Fellowship is a comparative research and learning initiative exploring how innovation and impact ecosystems build momentum, organize collectively, and evolve across Canada and Africa. Rather than focusing narrowly on deal sourcing or investment pipelines, the initiative seeks to better understand the ecosystem conditions that enable long-term resilience, innovation, trust, and coordination. Hanae’s approach translates rigorous systems analysis and insights into accessible, practitioner-oriented learning tools relevant to investors, institutions, entrepreneurs, and ecosystem builders.

Canada is entering a period where diversification of global relationships, innovation partnerships, and impact investment pathways is becoming increasingly strategic. At the same time, innovation and impact ecosystems across Africa have evolved significantly over the past decade, demonstrating strong entrepreneurial momentum, adaptive governance models, ecosystem coordination, and new forms of bottom-up institutional innovation that are often overlooked in traditional investment narratives. Hanae’s Fellowship seeks to:

• Compare ecosystem-building dynamics across selected Canadian and African contexts;
• Explore how innovation and impact ecosystems evolve and sustain momentum over time;
• Identify transferable lessons and practical frameworks for ecosystem activation; and
• Support Canadian asset owners, investors, and institutions in developing more informed engagement with African ecosystems with accessible, actionable resources.

Tracey Robertson is a deeply relational leader, known for connecting people, ideas, and institutions that don’t naturally sit together. She works at the intersection of capital, innovation, and community impact as a capital systems architect, ecosystem builder, and relational strategist, grounded in the belief that systems change happens through relationships and that trust is essential to mobilizing capital at scale.

After working across philanthropy, finance, and community systems for over 30 years — often acting as a bridge across silos and sectors — she now partners with high-net-worth women, next-generation leaders, and mission-driven organizations and networks to reimagine how wealth is stewarded and mobilized, and to move from intention to action in activating resources in more inclusive and catalytic ways. In 2026, she was honoured to receive Canada’s first Blended Finance Champion Award.

Tracey’s Fellowship seeks to strengthen the connective tissue across the capital spectrum and deepen our understanding of how capital can move from fragmented, transaction-based deployment toward more relational, coordinated, systems-oriented strategies in service of long-term, equitable outcomes. As one of 30 leaders from around the world participating in University of Cambridge’s Better Futures Programme, Tracey will apply these global insights and learnings to inform and co-design Impact United’s systemic investing programming with practical and actionable pathways for Canadian investors and asset owners.

Tracey’s Fellowship recognizes that our systems of investment and philanthropic capital were not designed to allow all forms of wealth to work together — there is no shortage of generosity, investment, or innovation, yet so much capital remains disconnected from the outcomes we all say we want to achieve. Instead of asking “How do we unlock more capital?”, Tracey’s Fellowship seeks to explore and answer:

• How do we create a wealth system where philanthropic, private, public and community capital reinforce one another rather than operate in parallel?
• What relationships, trust and infrastructure are missing?
• What if the greatest opportunity isn’t creating new pools of capital, but redesigning how wealth takes shape?

Get Involved

If your work can contribute to or benefit from Hanae and Tracey’s Fellowships, we invite you to reach out at hello@impactunited.ca and we would be happy to connect you.

We are also seeking funding to enable the next iteration of this Global Fellowship program, where we intend to pair recent graduates or early-career professionals with these experienced and established leaders to facilitate reciprocal mentorship, mutual leadership development, and collaborative field-building. We are welcome the opportunity to work with interested funders, sponsors, and partners to contribute to thought leadership and a more diverse pipeline of next-generation talent for Canada’s asset owner and impact investor ecosystem.