Accelerating the Accelerators Conference 2021: Thriving Forward

Accelerating the Accelerators brings together purpose-first Entrepreneur Support Organization (ESO) leaders; accelerators, incubators, competitions, and fellowships from around the globe to learn, collaborate, and create the next generation of thriving founders, organizations, and support for innovation toward a better world in 2021 and beyond.

In the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic and America’s racial reckoning of 2020, communities are clear that the only ways to rebuild, re-energize and recover are to work collaboratively to address complex social problems. It is no longer enough to focus on strengthening individual entrepreneurs with the hope of enabling them to meet community residents’ needs. The mere commitment or desire to collaborate, no matter how strong, has never resulted in successful solutions to even the tamest of community challenges. Social entrepreneurs AND investors must build their own capacity to work in relationship with each other, set clear goals, share stories of successes and barriers, find common ground, and establish clear and consistent communications pathways—as prerequisites for any collaborative venture to affect real and lasting change.

Thriving Founders Session: Who Decides Who’s Ready—To Launch and Scale a Social Enterprise?

When supporting social entrepreneurs, investors typically determine whether entrepreneurs are “ready” to launch, when they should be questioning their own readiness to engage in ecosystem innovation. Investor-entrepreneur power dynamics often inhibit trust building and the staying power of social entrepreneurship initiatives. This session will explore “readiness” barriers that prevent founders, organizations, and ecosystems from thriving.

Join us to build:

• Increased appreciation of the steps required to reach a level playing field between investors and entrepreneurs when launching and scaling social enterprises.
• Ability to self-assess ways conference participants can address aspects of their own organizational readiness to engage in innovative social enterprise development productively, with increased trust.
• Increased investor, social entrepreneur, and ESO appreciation for building Relational Capacity—defined as an organization’s ability to understand its position within an ecosystem, build/activate relationships, engage in trust-building, and apply an equity lens to all aspects of their work.

Panelists

• Julie Simpson, Partner and Director, Nonprofit Effectiveness, TCC Group
• Tim Hausmann, Consultant, Nonprofit Effectiveness, TCC Group
• Andrea Kellum, Senior Program Officer, Healthcare Georgia Foundation