Hello friends,

Welcome back to Theory of Change, where I help leaders, founders, and creators build organisations that donors trust, teams love, and society actually needs.

Through till November, I’m exploring frameworks and ideologies imported from the marketing and tech world that don’t always survive contact with the nonprofit world.

This week: Accelerators. You’ve all seen them: twelve-week bootcamps promising to turn bright ideas into scalable impact. The slide decks, the demo days, the slogans about resilience.

But talk to the people inside them and a different story emerges of long hours, recycled advice, and tiny grants dressed up as investment.

So, let’s talk about what a good accelerator could actually look like.

(But before you do, and if you're new here, maybe subscribe?)

WHAT IT'S SUPPOSED TO BE

The accelerator model as broadly adopted can be traced to 2005 with Y Combinator. Paul Graham and his co-founders offered startups a short, intense burst of funding, mentoring, and investor introductions, culminating in a public demo day.

It worked. Reddit, Dropbox, and Airbnb all emerged from early YC cohorts. Then came Techstars in Colorado, Seedcamp in London, and dozens more. The format was clear: a few months, a focused cohort, an investment.

At its best, this approach helps founders at a critical inflection point to turn an idea into a viable model. It’s a blend of capital, coaching, and community that works well in markets built for growth.

I built and ran my own (the biggest being the $2m Engaged Journalism Accelerator, which a bunch of other European accelerators were modelled from). I’ve known social entrepreneurs who’ve been through the Y Combinator process. And I’ve been a coach, mentor, and jury member on multiple other accelerators in different sectors.

Fundamentally, I think it a good idea that philanthropy and civil society tries to adapt the model. But sometimes, when the model crosses into the social sector, the logic warps. People forget the first principles accelerators are built on and fail to adapt for a very different space.

And the results are, well… not good.

WHERE IT FALLS APART

In the commercial world, accelerators are investment vehicles. Risk and reward are (theoretically) shared. In the social world, the exchange is murkier. Participants pour in time, ideas, and emotional labour; in return they get advice that often replays the same lean startup tropes I wrote about in newsletter #046 (fail fast, pivot, scale at all costs).

You’ll probably be tired of hearing me say this by now, but not everything should scale, and not every social venture can or should be sustainable in market terms. Some exist to plug urgent gaps or deliver public goods that will never pay for themselves.

Yet many accelerators still treat financial sustainability as the ultimate goal, even when that’s a poor fit.

The result: a conveyor belt of small organisations going through the motions of a growth-stage startup instead of learning how to deepen impact, strengthen partnerships, or build dependable grant pipelines. They sink countless hours into attending obligatory seminars, talking to unqualified coaches, and be corralled into pivots that don't suit their market or talent.

Often the resulting ideas are very samey. The people designing these programmes often come from the same small circle of innovation consultants (takes one to know one, eh?). They know the sector’s language but not always its blind spots. Few accelerators bring in radical outsiders (artists, activists, economists, technologists) who might actually challenge the system rather than optimise it. And that doesn’t help us overcome the kind of wicked problems (see: newsletter #021) we so desperately need to interrogate.

While accelerators were meant to bridge the gap between capital and capability, many just mirror the systems they set out to reform. They're risk-averse, metrics-obsessed, and somewhat allergic to complexity.

And that’s exactly why the model needs rethinking.

A BETTER WAY TO THINK ABOUT IT

A good accelerator can still be a powerful tool if it’s designed with honesty about what it’s really accelerating. In nonprofitland, that means shifting from a growth logic to a care-and-commons logic. Instead of forcing every organisation towards scale or sustainability, a purpose-built accelerator should help participants:

• strengthen delivery models,

• document and share learning,

• build networks of mutual support, and

• attract reliable, long-term funding.

That’s acceleration too, just in a different direction.

To rebalance this, we need dedicated funds, mission-aligned investors, and financing tools designed for public-good work backed by expertise from beyond the social sector. Foundations like MacArthur, Open Society Foundations, and Skoll are experimenting here through their investments, using capital to absorb risk and attract new partners. Organisations like Bethnal Green Ventures has shown how a tech-for-good accelerator can blend finance and mission without losing either (though they still heavily index on scale).

What this field needs, imho, isn’t venture capital; it’s catalytic capital. It needs money patient enough to build shared infrastructure, confident enough to back unproven models, and humble enough to accept that returns might be social, not financial. It’s a space most investors still ignore - there’s a yawning chasm between the VC world and the grant-making world (the conservatism of philanthropic boards has much to do with this, but that’s another newsletter).

Combine that with an accelerator and we can start talking about impact. For that, funders and intermediaries need to design the accelerator to derisk the work itself, not just the organisation.

In other words, they need to accept impact in the form of networks, connections, and rising tides, not just a shiny success story or $X figure exit.

TRY IT THIS WEEK

If you’re designing an accelerator, consider the following:

1. Pay participants fairly for their contribution (including applying and pitching). Treat their time as co-investment, not free labour.

2. Bring in people who aren’t from the usual innovation circuit.

3. Make room for organisations that want to deepen, as well as grow.

4. Keep what’s created (frameworks, research, tools) open and reusable across the field.

5. Build time for rest, reflection, and peer support. Acceleration without care is extraction.

If you’re a funder, the ask is simple: give adequate, catalytic capital. 

If you’re invited to join an accelerator, ask: are we being developed, or harvested? What kind of sustainability is this aiming for?

And if you’re already in one, document what real growth looks like for you and don’t get distracted by the intrinsic motivations of the funder or intermediary.

The most radical kind of acceleration is learning how to sustain meaning, not just money. Some ideas deserve patient funding. Some need collective stewardship. Some are meant to end, gracefully, once the need passes.

The value then is in what circulates, not what’s captured and I believe the best accelerators make that circulation visible with money, knowledge, and trust, all shared to further the broader field, not one organisation’s ambitions.

🌊 WAVE GOODBYE 🌊

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Next week: Marketing funnels!

Take care,

Adam

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