Intent
Our goals this year were rooted in solving problems of poverty and building a world based on dignity. We're keen to share our progress, notably through the Acumen Fellows Program and The Foundry.
The Acumen Fellows Program nurtures leaders committed to dignity, while The Foundry unites alumni driving social change and challenging the status quo.
Goal 1
Build a committed cohort of social innovators with character and competence, intending to create an inclusive, just, and sustainable world.
Goal 2
Cultivate a robust fellowship experience for two cohorts, providing tailored coaching to nurture each leader's potential within our committed community.
Goal 3
Expand and fortify the Foundry space to extend its social impact across India, fostering connections, providing support, and amplifying the voices of change-makers.
Goal 4
Innovate and introduce new initiatives within the Foundry ecosystem, fostering growth and adaptation to meet evolving challenges.
Acumen
Fellows Program
The Acumen Fellows Program focuses on fostering social innovators which has now evolved to include three immersive seminars and two workshops.
Format of the program
2 x 6-day Seminars In-Person
Virtual Interactions across 7 months
35
Fellows
representing diverse backgrounds and experiences, successfully completed the program this year
Highlights from 2024
8.95/10 facilitation rating effectiveness in the facilitated learnings delivered in immersive seminars.
10 coaches, also alumni of Acumen Programs, played a pivotal role in the growth path as coaches.
10 fellows played a pivotal role by leading fellow-led sessions for their cohorts.
All 35 fellows stated that their leadership impact has slightly or very much improved as a result of cohort and the fellowship experience.
Impact Stories
Leading with agency and authenticity
Pratibha, co-founder of Involve, joined the Acumen Fellowship to refine her leadership and embrace vulnerability as strength. Through candid feedback and polarity management, she shifted from conviction-driven leadership to adaptability and shared ownership. This transformation strengthened Involve’s foundation, integrating strategy with emotional intelligence. Today, she leads with clarity, resilience, and a deep belief in collective progress.
Bold leadership for ocean sustainability
Divya Hegde, founder of Baeru Environmental Services, stepped into the fellowship with a bold vision but struggled with self-doubt and leadership balance. Engaging with Adaptive Leadership, she gained confidence, strengthened global partnerships, and refined Baeru’s impact model. Now, she leads with clarity and boldness, proving that personal transformation fuels systemic change.
Redefining Leadership Through Trust and Reflection
Bimal, founder of Gangpur Ventures, entered the fellowship seeking clarity and connection. Through coaching and deep reflection, he redefined his leadership, built trust, and reshaped his approach to development. By actively listening to communities, he evolved his impact model and embraced collaboration as a key to lasting change.
How Fellows rated the program
We enable the Acumen Fellows to grasp the intricacies of poverty, society and systemic challenges, equipping them to tackle organisational challenges. Instilling confidence and fostering a sense of belonging, we cultivate a community where each member thrives. Our program stands at an average score of 85 Net Promoter Score (NPS) across these outcomes.
85 NPS
“For the past few years, my identity, story was limited only with my organisation. After the immersive, I have been introduced to myself as an individual as a leader. It is about my perspective, skills, experiences, personality which is reflecting on the work I chose to do. I have developed a deeper understanding of my strengths and areas for growth. This self-awareness has led to more authentic and confident interactions with others. The program has broadened my perspective, making me more receptive to different viewpoints and ideas. The openers have improved my ability to collaborate effectively and approach challenges from multiple angles.”
Parikshit Borkotoky, Spring ‘24
“For the larger mission we all working towards, [Acumen helped with] creating and demanding a place of respect and equality for self and nurturing others to practice the same”
Ishpreet Kaur, Fall ‘24
“Acumen has helped me expanded on the depth of understanding of my own self and the larger society, work of other leaders in creating change”
Rajesh Meher, Fall ‘ 24
“I’m calmer, more confident. I give space and hold space for others. I’ve changed the way I give feedback and hold opposing views. Allow discomfort in order to encourage the work at the centre”
Tabish Habib, Spring ‘24
On the program
Learnings & Reflections
Empowered Leadership & Informed Choice
We will build our curriculum that reflects a resilience-informed approach — one that empowers fellows with meaningful choices, recognizing that true leadership emerges when people have the agency to shape their own paths.
Diverse Voices & Deeper Impact
We must intentionally diversify our trainer and coaching pool, ensuring our fellowship facilitation is rooted in resilience—embracing diverse perspectives to cultivate deeper learning and transformation.
Strengthen, Expand & Transform
Our coaching interventions have grown in depth over the past few years — a foundation we must now strengthen and expand to unlock even greater impact.
The Foundry
The Foundry serves as a community space for visionary social innovators who have successfully completed Acumen Academy’s Programs.
It unlocks access to an exclusive set of resources, including a dynamic community of peers, the prospect of personalised one-to-one mentorship, and the gateway to harnessing both social and financial capital to drive meaningful impact.
341
Social Innovators
are a part of the Foundry
160+ social-innovators
gathered this year
70% engaged with the
community actively
Celebrating 10 Years of Acumen Fellows in India!
This year marks a major milestone — the 10th anniversary of the Acumen Fellows Program in India! We were thrilled to celebrate this momentous occasion and honor the journey we’ve shared with our Acumen Board Members, whose unwavering support and leadership have been vital to our growth.
Nate Laurell (Board Chair), Hans Taparia, Cristina Ljungberg, Matthew Courey, Andrea Soros Colombel, Karen Paterson, Kirsten Nevill-Manning, Jacqueline Novogratz and Carlyle Singer.
We were delighted to host an intimate gathering with key members of our community — long-standing supporters, global board members, and leadership team — to reflect on our journey and envision the future together.
Here’s to a decade of impact — and many more to come!
Accompaniment
Acumen is committed to nurturing and amplifying the efforts of social innovators in India, supported by the dedication of our team and community members.
We take pride in the recognition our leaders have received from various esteemed organizations, fostering continuous growth and impact in the pursuit of positive change.
Genpact’s Better World Initiative
Our collaboration with Genpact’s Better World Initiative has helped build the capacity of nonprofit leaders, including Samina Bano (Founder of Rightwalk Foundation), Revathi R (Founder & Director Vanavil Trust), Dilip Suthar (Co-Founder of Anubhuti), Irwan Malhotra (Founder of GivFunds), Neeladri Bora (Co-Founder, NEAID), Lewitt Somarajan (Founder & CEO, Life-Lab), Prahalathan KK (Co-Founder, Bhumi), Priyanka Sanghai (Lead - Programme Development, Antarang Foundation) and Dharamjeet Kumar (Co-Founder & Director - Livelihood, Ayang Trust).
Pro bono support from Dell
We also received invaluable pro bono support from Dell, providing strategic consulting to nonprofit leaders such as Dharamjeet Kumar (Co-Founder & Director - Livelihood, Ayang Trust), Priyanka Sanghai (Lead - Programme Development, Antarang Foundation), Anoop Maurya (Founder, Bharat Navodaya Abhiyan), and Neeladri Bora (Co-Founder, NEAID).
Forbes India’s 30 Under 30
We’re celebrating Abhinav Shekhar Vashistha, Co-Founder of WeVOIS Labs & Soumya Dabriwal, Founder of Project Baala on making Forbes India’s 30 Under 30 list for 2025! Know more about them and their work here: 30 Under 30 2025
2024 Meaningful Business 100
Amit Singha (Founder of Anuprena), Ayan S R (Founder of Katidhan), Gurashish (Co-Founder of ReCircle), and Yogesh Kumar (Founder of EvenCargo) have been selected for the 2024 Meaningful Business 100—a distinguished group of leaders who are blending profit and purpose to drive meaningful change. Learn more here: Meaningful Business 100 - 2024.
SAP’s MovingWorlds
This year we could also build a relationship with SAP’s MovingWorlds, an initiative designed to help social enterprises forge revenue-generating partnerships with the corporate sector, enabling deeper integration into global value chains. Through Acumen’s partnership with SAP, we have facilitated pro bono volunteering support for organizations such as Gram Vaani (Vijay Sai Pratap, Co-Founder), Buzz Women (Uthara Narayanan, Founder), and FMCH India (Shruthi Iyer, Co-Founder).
Studio Subu
We partnered with Studio Subu to design a program supporting 10 organizations from the Foundry, strengthening their capacity to craft compelling narratives from the ground up. This initiative supported organizations to develop long-term storytelling capabilities, enhance communication with stakeholders, and build a strong marketing outreach. The program provided direct support to Saumya Aggarwal (Cofounder & CEO, The Unifly Collective), Sanjay Chauhan (Founder & CEO, MuddleArt Pvt Ltd), Yutika Vora (Co-Founder, Nagrika), Swapnil Gawande (Managing Trustee & Secretary, Deesha Education Foundation), Rashi Vidyasagar (Founder, The Alternative Story), Shashank Mittal (Lead, Partnerships & Development, Community Design Agency, Mumbai), Shilpi Agarwal (Founder and Director, Social Action for Knowledge Building and Awareness Raising - SAKAR), Sweetlana Ranjan (Programme Director, iBehind The Ink), Ashok Rathod (Founder & CEO,OSCAR Foundation) and Natasha Zarine (Founder & Director, EcoSattva).
Providing access to funds for our innovators
Annually, the Acumen Academy team in India accompanies social innovators in the Foundry with fundraising, providing personalised support to bolster their programs and expand their impactful work across regions or deepen them in their respective communities.
Mobilizing Resources for Under-Served Communities
Over ₹1 crore was mobilized to support underserved communities, particularly in the North-East India and Systemically-Excluded Communities. Key initiatives include NEAID - Northeast Centre for Equity Action on Integrated Development (founded by Neeladri Bora), ELICIT (founded by Lopa), and the Movement of Scavenger Community (founded by Vimal Kumar), Grassroot NGO (founded by Mayfereen) and AMYAA NGO (founded by RK Paul) received financial assistance through our network of supporters, including Dasra and Rohini Nilekani Philanthropies, strengthening their ability to drive lasting change.
Securing Long-Term Sustainability
Towards sustained impact, OneALL Trust (founded by Varsha Yashwant Kumar) secured a three-year funding commitment from Social Venture Partners India (SVP). This crucial support was made possible through the trust and recommendations within our community of social innovators, reinforcing the power of collaborative networks like Acumen.
Fueling Innovation for the Next Billion
Next Bharat Ventures, committed to supporting impact entrepreneurs in India, selected four for-profit social enterprises for their first-ever residency program, unlocking opportunities for funding and scale. Congratulations to Nivedita Rai (Founder of Khargewale), Aakriti Srivastava (Founder of Bahula Naturals), Prerna Agrarwal (Founder of Samkhya), and Shubhra (Founder of Meira Foods) for being chosen to lead the way in creating transformative change.
Big thanks to the various organizations for supporting our leaders and helping them grow.
Acumen Angels
Acumen Angels offers early-stage capital to support social innovators in our alumni community, enabling them to launch and scale ventures addressing global poverty.
The program targets entrepreneurs at the blueprint and early validation stage, providing critical funding for idea development and business model refinement. Grounded in Acumen’s decades of experience, it emphasizes trust in entrepreneurs' moral character and business competence. This year, five winners were celebrated for their innovative solutions, poised to assess scalability and manage associated risks. Uthara Narayanan (Buzz Women), Neha Sahu (Launch Girls), Ashok Rathod (OSCAR Foundation), Satyendra Kumar (National Youth Equity Forum - NYEF) and Shashank Mittal (Community Design Agency, Mumbai) are the five winners from India.
Learn more about all the winners here.
Gatherings
We believe in the power of community—bringing together people across lines of difference, even those with opposing views, to challenge the status quo while keeping the work at the center. Through partnerships, collaborations, and the support of one another as advisors, allies, and friends, we create spaces where tensions can coexist with purpose.
Fostering Deeper Sectoral Conversations
This year, we convened 174 people—about 50% of our community—across 17 sectorial-groups, facilitating sectoral and focused conversations. These gatherings allowed those tackling similar challenges to exchange ideas, share interventions, and build collective solutions.
Our Largest Community Gathering Yet
In Kolkata, we hosted our largest-ever community gathering, bringing together 90 leaders (about 30% of our community) to reimagine what it means to build a thriving, connected network. Together, we explored the diverse needs within our ecosystem and co-created a shared value system that will anchor our collective impact.
Elevating Collective Leadership
At our annual gathering in Kolkata, 17 social innovators stepped up to facilitate conversations that deepened connections and advanced meaningful work. The impact of these spaces was clear: 90% of participants felt heard, reflecting our commitment to fostering dialogue across differences & 70% built new connections and engaged with ideas that challenged them—embracing the diversity that defines our community.
The Foundry
Fostering collectives in India
The North-East India Collective is gaining momentum, driven by an inspiring group of social innovators and now backed by funds from Rainmatter Foundation to expand access to entrepreneurship and impact opportunities. The collective us evolving, the innovators have embraced ownership of their journey, shaping a shared vision and strategy to strengthen the region’s development ecosystem. From launching youth-led peacebuilding programs to empowering women through local value chains and expanding regional products into national markets, the collective is showcasing the untapped potential of North-East India — proving that collaboration, trust, and resilient leadership can drive lasting social and economic change.
3 Acumen Fellows launched the Peace Architect Training Program, empowering youth in Meghalaya and Manipur to lead non-violent conflict resolution efforts.
2 organizations (Ayang Trust & Meira Foods) partnered to create a local value chain for bamboo candies and dried fruits, empowering women in Majuli, Assam.
Jome Foods scaled GALHO Honey into national retail stores, supported by Acumen Angels capital towards catalytic interventions.
First-of-its-kind investment from Next Bharat Ventures into a North-East for-profit venture (Meira Foods).
Local youth to manage the collective’s admin and logistics to ensure sustained ownership.
The Foundry
Learnings & Reflections
Building a Community of Moral Leaders
We’re cultivating a community of leaders committed to tackling India’s most pressing challenges. With over 300 social innovators, we’re learning how to design spaces that matter — where individuals can partner, collaborate, and grow. This year, we piloted a bold experiment: 16 purpose-driven groups, uniting 174 innovators across regions, sectors, and lenses. 135 of them built at least one meaningful connection. This is just the start — we’re uncovering what it takes to create spaces that center around shared purpose and collective action.
Bridging Lines of Difference
Our community is a space where differences collide — where diverse identities, histories, and perspectives challenge one another. These tensions are not barriers but opportunities to forge deeper understanding. As they emerge, we’re reminded that thriving together demands a shared moral framework — a value system that holds us accountable to one another, helping us show up with empathy, acknowledge differences, and stand together in our shared pursuit of dignity and equity.
Accompanying Change, Together
We’re witnessing powerful connections emerge — partnerships built, knowledge shared, resources exchanged. But for this community to flourish, we need more than connections. We need an ecosystem of enablers: funders, investors, capacity builders, accelerators, incubators, and fellowship programs who are committed to walking alongside those on the ground. Our goal is to cultivate a network of allies — a system that doesn’t just support but truly accompanies social innovators in their journey to create lasting change.
Acumen Fellows Speak
At project Khel our mission is to create joyful learning experiences and leveraging the principles of safe spaces and gender sensitivity to create holistic development of children.
The biggest tool that my fellowship year gave to me was, asking this question of ‘what is the loss?’, what is the loss that the other person will have if they agree to what I am saying and that has significantly helped me in working with various teams that I work with.
Angana Prasad
Project KHEL
Spring 2021
Behind the work
The Advisory Committee are members of the Foundry, accompanying the team at Acumen Academy to build the community and the programs towards evolving needs.
CEO of Youth Alliance, a Delhi-based nonprofit fostering empathic leadership in young people. Youth Alliance has 620 alumni, including 35 enterprises and 250 development careers.
Co-founder of Buzz India & Gambia, empowering low-income women with financial, business, and leadership skills to combat poverty.
Leads Khabar Lahariya, India’s only all-women rural news channel, training women journalists in remote villages to report local news.
Founder of Guardians of Dreams, working to improve the quality of care in children’s homes across India. A GP Birla Fellow at Ananta Aspen, she specializes in institutional, corporate, and volunteer-driven fundraising.
CEO & Co-founder of Haqdarshak, digitizing welfare schemes and providing application support to 4M+ beneficiaries. His team of 10,000+ operates across 25 states. A Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia honoree, he is also a Schwab and Schmidt Futures Fellow.
Meet the team behind Acumen Academy's impactful programs, unleashing and nurturing the next generation of moral leaders in India:
Overseeing the Acumen Investment’s and the Acumen Academy’s work in India
Managing the Acumen Fellows Program and The Foundry initiatives
Delivering the Acumen Fellows Program for cohorts of social-innovators (now transitioned to the global facilitation and training team)
Executing the the Acumen Fellows Program to impart moral leadership curriculum to the social-innovators
Accompanying the community of social innovators to address their individual and collective needs
Partnerning for Impact
We achieve more when we work with our supporters playing a key role in enabling the work of social-innovators across India.
