Intent
Our goals last year were ambitious and continue to push us!
Enable 375+ Foundry members to create partnerships, scale and deepen their impact
Goal 1
Select and catalyze the leadership of 35-38 builders through a rigorous curriculum and cohort experience
Goal 2
60 Builders complete a program which inspires social entrepreneurship (in hard to reach regions) through partner organisations
Goal 3
Build partnerships for local India based Angel funding towards accompanying Foundry members
Goal 4
It has been a year full of experiments, pushing what’s possible and continuing to learn. Learning from what hasn’t worked, learning from conversations with our Foundry members and partners, and most of all learning from the work our Foundry does that continues to push and inspire us.
Thank you for contributing to our year together.
Acumen Fellows Program
The Acumen Fellows Program focuses on fostering social innovators with leadership skills that enable them to work through complex leadership challenges.
Format of the program
Virtual engagement across 7 months
2 in-person seminars
35
Fellows
representing diverse backgrounds and experiences, successfully completed the program in 2025
Highlights from 2025
Facilitation rating effectiveness in the facilitated learnings delivered in immersive seminars have consistently been rated above a 3 on a 4 point scale.
19 Acumen Fellows from the Acumen Alumni either coached or facilitated key parts of the fellowship, playing a pivotal partnership role and also enabling their own growth path as coaches and facilitators
14 Acumen candidates played a pivotal role by leading fellow-led sessions for their cohorts
34/35 fellows stated that their leadership abilities have improved as a result of cohort and fellowship experience
Impact Stories
Learning from failure and success
Arindam, Co-founder and CEO of Tamul Plates Marketing Pvt. Ltd began with the image of the one who spoke a few words. With trust in the brave space the cohort created, Arindam revealed undecorated stories of heartbreak - of having to shut shop in an area they had their operations for more than a decade. He raised the bar for the whole group to be authentic, honest and learn from what is real for the self and for business. In his words - “something unexpected happened: I found myself talking about my failures. Not as footnotes, not as lessons learned, but as whole stories. For the first time in a long time, I spoke about the things that broke me, confused me, frustrated me and I didn’t feel the need to justify or wrap them in success. It was liberating. Because in that space, failure wasn’t weakness. Failure was data. Failure was honesty. Failure was human. And that shift, that normalization of imperfection was one of the greatest gifts this fellowship gave me.”
Walking the Talk
Namrata, Co-founder at Anahat For Change Foundation, a feminist voice in the space entered the fellowship feeling challenged about expressing her own voice.
She took early risks, naming behavioural patterns in the cohort. Being open to feedback enabled her to see patterns and work on herself to both ally, ask for help and put her needs, observations and beliefs on the table with conviction. This growth has helped her to stand strong with co founders and senior leaders in discussions of HR policies at work to ensure value alignment with mission. Namrata learned to invest multiple fellows in the cohort through varying strategies to listen to, observe and work towards their roles in bringing about gender parity. In the end a fellow mentioned that had it not been for Namrata they would have been blind to what they needed to see.
Listening and Building Investment
Swapneel Paul, IAS, District Commissioner, Kamrup Metropolitan District, Assam entered the fellowship with a thirst for learning and the need of peers outside his space to learn from.
His candid participation enabled him to transform his lens and relationship with power. What this transformation resulted in was the shift of belief to understand what it means for people to work through building ownership rather than from the fear of consequences. When he began it was hard for him to listen to a perspective that seemed opposite to his own. Through experiences, feedback and reflection he focussed on building better listening . It is when he began to listen to people in his community about their needs that building a community library in his district transformed into new ways of doing work. The library that became a star project was quickly owned by the community since their needs were put at the centre. Witnessing this transformation in Swapneel also brought hope for others in the cohort, humanizing bureaucrats and rekindling efforts to work with them in their respective fields.
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 89 Net Promoter Score (NPS) across these outcomes.
93
Spring Cohort
85
Fall Cohort
“The "Looking within" aspect, the beautifully compiled readings and the handpicked peer group”
Co-founder and CEO, Humble Bee
“For its ability to very subtly nudge us towards being better leaders by transforming ourselves instead of the world”
District Collector, Nandurbar, Maharashtra
“I think it is a wonderful space to test your ideas, your being and even your work. It truly gives you space to see yourself independently and as a part of the community. It will indeed bring one a lot of strength and support, and a lot of joy too!”
Co-founder and CEO, Baithak Foundation
“The Fellowship provides a truly transformative experience. The unique blend of personal growth, systems thinking, and community engagement equips you not just to lead projects, but to lead change. Most importantly, the Fellowship connects you with a diverse and inspiring community of fellows..”
Founder, MotherQuilts
On the program
Learnings & Reflections
Partnership is key
A Foundry member was a fellowship coach for a whole program. Foundry involvement in the fellowship is evidence of their investment in people entering the foundry. It is also key as it brings diverse relevant examples in the room and also informs the team of changing needs in the fellowship. We want to keep enabling Foundry members to engage meaningfully in the fellowship.
Learning Requires Revisiting
We must intentionally plan for leadership building in the Foundry and build from the learning in the fellowship. Moving ahead we want to immerse in leadership learning needs in the foundry too.
Authority and Leadership
With the current context of the world where trust in authority is low, we have witnessed that the resistance to authority is quite high when the fellows come into the program. We have to consistently remind ourselves about how much we want to intervene for change and also enable feedback and work to happen majorly within peers vs from experts that come into the fellowship.
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.
376
Social Innovators
are a part of the Foundry
Impact Survey
In 2025, after a decade of the Fellowship in India, We conducted the first comprehensive survey of the Foundry to better understand the long-term influence of the program and the community. More than 200 Foundry members - about 60% participated, sharing insights on how the Fellowship has shaped their leadership, organisations, and collaborations. The findings highlight strong gains in leadership confidence, values-driven decision-making, and community among Fellows, while also surfacing areas for deeper engagement, including strengthening peer collaboration, leveraging social capital, and expanding cross-sector partnerships. Together, these reflections offer an important snapshot of how the Foundry is evolving and where we can focus efforts in the years ahead.
Key insights from the survey include:
82%
of members reported connecting with diverse peers across geographies and sectors. At the same time, the data shows clear areas for growth - particularly in strengthening regular mentorship, which remain weaker links.
72%
of members reached out to 5–10 peers over the past year. This signals an active network, yet also highlights that the community is still underutilised, with room to deepen action-oriented collaboration and support.
48%
of members reported active collaboration within the community - a significant milestone for a community that has been intentionally nurtured for over a decade.
Together, these insights give us both confidence in what is working and clarity on where to focus next as we continue shaping a more connected, supportive, and impactful community.
Collaborations within Foundry
46
Unique Partnerships within the Foundry Community
Reported through the Foundry Impact Survey, reflecting collaborations across organizations working in different sectors and institutional forms.
Purvi Bhavsar × Shailesh Dixit
Expanding Access to Finance
Purvi Bhavsar (Pahal Financial Services) and Shailesh Dixit (Co-founder & CEO, Gromor Finance) partnered to expand access to credit for small businesses through a FinTech-enabled co-lending model. Focused on e-commerce merchants, the collaboration onboarded 500+ small businesses and facilitated 800+ loans within five months, enabling over ₹22 crore in credit to support enterprise growth.
Cross-Sector Collaboration
32 partnerships involved organizations working in related sectors such as education, livelihoods, and agriculture.
Diverse Organization Types
Collaborations span for-profits, nonprofits, hybrid organizations, and government actors.
Sector Connectors
Education emerged as the most common sector connecting partnerships, followed by financial inclusion.
Infrastructure
Over the past year, we focused on strengthening the infrastructure that enables the Foundry community to connect and collaborate independently. This includes developing a Foundry Directory that allows members to discover peers across cohorts, geographies, and sectors; an Ally Directory that curates ecosystem partners offering funding, capacity-building, and other forms of support; and introducing Circle, a digital community platform designed to facilitate conversations, opportunity sharing, and connections within the India and global Foundry networks. Together, these tools aim to make it easier for members to find each other, exchange knowledge, and initiate collaborations.
Charter
This charter is shaped by the real, courageous, and honest voices of over 120+ foundry-members across India - individuals who listened, engaged, acted, and gave voice to complexity.
They spoke from across cities and villages, across lines of difference and purpose. Through dialogue, participation, and reflection, they helped us understand the diverse needs and expectations of our community - to hold them, honor them, and build with them.
These voices asked us to take “belonging” seriously - not just as an idea, but as a daily act of leadership.
Acumen Fellows Speak
I work with small farmers to build frugal, climate-smart tools - solutions that raise incomes while removing fossil fuels and chemicals from their fields. The work is deeply rewarding, but rarely straightforward.
The Fellowship didn’t give me better arguments. It taught me to slow down, listen longer, and stay in conversations I would earlier have walked away from. Over time, detractors turned into allies - which gave me the courage to choose the harder path, and the patience to take setbacks without turning bitter.
But above all, it gave me friends - for life. This community helped me rediscover what often gets lost in the grind: the joy, hope, and dreams that first brought us here.
Foundry Coming Together
Cohort Spaces and Regional Gatherings
At Acumen India, engagement isn’t just a check-in or a calendar invite, it’s the crucial part of our strategy to accompany our social innovators not only as professionals, but as humans, navigating the complex, courageous work of changing systems for good. Over time, cohorts tend to disengage without consistent and intentional engagement. Without regular touchpoints, members lose connection, reducing collective momentum and impact.
And this is where Cohort Spaces and Gatherings come in. And how we keep enabling, catalysing and creating these spaces is what continues to build the human infrastructure that the foundry is.
15+
Cohorts Engaged (2014–2024)
177
participated in cohort spaces
100
participated in regional gatherings
7
Regional gatherings
2
Collective-led gatherings
Together, these spaces created room for members to reconnect, share challenges, and strengthen relationships.
Opening Pathways Through the Foundry
200+
Opportunities shared
30+
Opportunities facilitated
~180
Nominations submitted
~120
Foundry members nominated
Across the year, the Foundry shared and pursued opportunities across funding, awards, accelerators, and global networks. Several members were nominated across multiple programs, reflecting strong alignment between their work and available opportunities.
How the Foundry Activated These Opportunities
Foundry Members Opening Doors
For several major global opportunities, members who had previously participated in or benefited from these platforms helped identify and nominate peers from the community. This strengthened a growing practice within the network where members actively surface and extend opportunities to others.
Learning How Opportunities Flow Across the Network
The process also revealed patterns in how opportunities move across the Foundry. While some members engaged with multiple opportunities during the year, others had fewer touchpoints due to sector alignment, eligibility, or timing. In the coming year, we will build a clearer way to track nominations and participation across the community, helping ensure opportunities reach a broader set of leaders and align more closely with needs surfaced through the Foundry Impact Survey.
Strengthening the Ecosystem: Capacity Building Through the Life Stage Survey
We partnered with Atma to implement the Transformation through Capacity Building Initiative. The program used Atma’s Life Stage Survey (LSS), a structured diagnostic tool, to conduct in-depth organisational assessments for seven foundry members. The initiative enabled organisations to better understand their current stage of maturity and identify specific capacity gaps critical for growth engagement supported leadership teams in aligning on priorities and strengthening internal systems. Participating organisations developed focused roadmaps targeting 2–4 key areas such as strategic planning, human resource systems, and impact measurement - helping them transition to institutionalised processes and prepare for the next phase of scale.
Founders Hub
featuring India Foundry members
Founders Hub is Acumen’s digital learning platform designed to support social entrepreneurs with practical guidance on building and scaling impact-driven organizations. The platform brings together case studies, tools, and short learning modules based on real experiences of founders working across sectors and geographies. Topics range from government partnerships and fundraising to impact measurement, revenue models, and scaling strategies. Through these resources, founders can access insights from peers who have navigated similar challenges and apply relevant lessons to their own work. Several Foundry Members from the India Foundry have contributed their experiences to the platform, helping shape learning resources used by social entrepreneurs globally.
Acumen Angels
Acumen Angels provides early-stage capital to social innovators enabling them to launch and scale ventures addressing poverty. Focused on entrepreneurs at the blueprint and early validation stage, the program supports idea development and business model refinement, grounded in trust in founders’ character and capability.
Since its launch, Acumen Angels has supported over 100 early-stage organisations globally, with the 2025 cohort awarding $1.2 million to 30 innovators working across sectors such as agriculture, education, energy, and livelihoods. This year, alongside the global cohort, Acumen also supported five India-based awards through locally mobilised funding, bringing the total number of India awardees to ten. The India awardees are Amitkumar Naphade (Krushi Vikas Va Gramin Prashikshan Sanstha), Anant Chaturvedi (Alternative Farmtech Pvt Ltd - Vikalp), Divish Gupta (Swadesi Way), Mohammad Aatish Khan (NatureDots), Piya Bahadur (MeraBills), Prerna Agarwal (Samakhya), Shashank Kalra (Youth Alliance), Suhani Jalota (Locara), Swapnil Gawande (Deesha Education Foundation), and Tabish Bilal (Project Second Chance).
Learn more about all the winners here.
Collectives
On 18th and 19th July 2025, at the NEI Collective Convening (#RisingNortheast), the North-East India Collective set out to bring together a diverse group of actors working in and with the region—across communities, civil society, business, government, media, and culture - to move beyond fragmented efforts and reimagine what working collectively could look like.
What emerged was a shared space where 36 partners and 12 NEI members began building relationships across sectors, surfacing lived realities, and challenging siloed narratives of the Northeast. The convening made it possible to not only reflect on the region’s complexities and strengths, but also to begin imagining pathways for collective leadership and action rooted in trust, context, and interdependence.
36
partners
12
NEI collective members
Behind the work
Our advisory board members are Foundry members who serve as trusted advisors, helping the team stay close to the community, shape thoughtful interventions, and remain grounded in our shared mission.
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 Dots by Ooloi Labs, working at the intersection of knowledge, data, communities, and design to support civil society organisations with context-driven, human-centric solutions.
Co-founder of S4S Technologies, enabling farmers - especially women -to increase incomes by converting farm losses into value-added products using patented solar dehydration technology.
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.
Co-founder of Bhumi, one of India’s largest volunteering organisations, mobilising citizens to advance education and social impact through large-scale volunteer engagement.
Foundry
Learnings & Reflections
Building a Community - and the Ecosystem Around It
We are now stewarding a community of over 370 members, with 48% actively collaborating and 72% leveraging the community in meaningful ways. While this reflects strong internal engagement, what remains critical is strengthening the ecosystem around the community. This includes funders, capacity-building partners, consulting and advisory organisations—enablers who can directly support members to reach their next milestones. Over the past year, we have taken deliberate steps to nurture this ecosystem by building trust, creating shared infrastructure, and convening partners in ways that make the network more accessible and actionable for the community.
Grounding Ourselves in Shared Values
Holding a diverse community - with different contexts, identities, and expectations - while growing together is not easy. To support this, we co-created a Community Charter, with nearly 50% of members actively shaping its final form. The Charter now serves as a grounding framework for how we show up for one another. What we are learning in real time is that a Charter is not static - it requires practice. Creating the right spaces to live these values, especially during moments of tension, is ongoing work, and we are learning from the Foundry itself what it truly takes to practice shared values.
Learning How to Build Communities
Community-building itself is deeply meaningful work, yet it is rarely captured through conventional metrics. Our social innovators work with many forms of community, and this year we paused to reflect on what it actually takes to build one - its principles, its conditions, and the invisible labor involved. There is no playbook, and few actors deeply understand the impact of this work. We are now honing our own practice, learning how to articulate it more clearly, and beginning to contribute to broader conversations about how community-building can be understood, valued, and measured in more meaningful ways.
Partners Meet
The Partner and Associations Gathering marked an important step in strengthening our broader ecosystem. Bringing together 17 partners across funding, program, and community networks, the convening created space to reconnect, share updates from the year, and build shared context. Together, we laid the groundwork for deeper trust, stronger relationships, and more aligned collaboration in support of our Foundry members. Overall, the gathering felt like a strong first step in bringing partners together.
Meet the team behind Acumen Academy's impactful programs, unleashing and nurturing the next generation of moral leaders in India:
Leading Acumen’s global operations and also overseeing the investments and the Acumen Academy’s work in India
Executing the Acumen Fellows Program to impart a moral leadership curriculum to social innovators
Managing the Acumen Fellows Program and The Foundry initiatives
Accompanying the community of social innovators to address their individual and collective needs
Leads the global facilitation and training work (Previously, delivered the Acumen Fellows Program for cohorts of social innovators for 4 years)
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.
An EY Global Delivery Services (EY GDS) Collaboration
