The world's school for social change
200 new Fellows each year
Join a global and growing community of Acumen Fellows.
1600+ Academy alumni
Our alumni community is impacting over 50 million lives around the world.
600K online learners
Our courses are for anyone, anywhere seeking to create positive impact in their communities.
Who we are
Acumen recognized early on that capital alone was not enough to address the problems of poverty, so we established Acumen Academy, the world’s school for social change. Our Fellowship program brings together cohorts of social enterprise founders working on problems of poverty. We equip them with the knowledge, skills, and community to grow their capacity, develop their moral leadership, and build scalable solutions.
We accompany Fellows for life, providing them with access to capital, community, and actionable resources to help scale their organizations. Not everyone can be a Fellow, so we’ve developed online courses for anyone, anywhere seeking to create positive impact in their communities.
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Our Manifesto
It starts by standing with the poor, listening to voices unheard, and recognizing potential where others see despair.
It demands investing as a means, not an end, daring to go where markets have failed and aid has fallen short. It makes capital work for us, not control us.
It thrives on moral imagination: the humility to see the world as it is, and the audacity to imagine the world as it could be. It’s having the ambition to learn at the edge, the wisdom to admit failure, and the courage to start again.
It requires patience and kindness, resilience and grit: a hard-edged hope. It’s leadership that rejects complacency, breaks through bureaucracy, and challenges corruption. Doing what’s right, not what’s easy.
Acumen: it’s the radical idea of creating hope in a cynical world. Changing the way the world tackles poverty and building a world based on dignity.