Design for Social Impact Accelerator: DESIGNING OTHERWISE
Next cohort starts June 5th 2026
An 8-week cohort for practitioners who design programmes and write proposals — and who are ready to reckon with the power they hold.
Power, Proposals, and the Politics of Programme Design
We're not designing for impact as an abstraction. We're designing otherwise — for dignity, for power, for futures that communities themselves get to author.
Who signs your proposals?
Who decides what gets designed?
What would change if you practised otherwise?
Why This Learning Space Exists
Programme design and proposal writing are treated as technical tasks.
They are not.
They decide whose knowledge counts. Which problems are worth funding. How money moves — and who controls it. What kinds of futures are considered realistic, and which are ruled out before communities have had any real say.
Most of us working in this sector already know this. We feel it in the gap between what we write and what we believe. In the participation processes we run that we know, honestly, are theatre. In the proposals we submit that sanitise our politics to be fundable.
Designing Otherwise exists because naming that gap is not enough. This is a space to work through it — with frameworks, with tools, with a community of people facing the same constraints and making different choices anyway
Who should join
This is for you if you are:
- programme designers, proposal writers, or strategists in INGOs, foundations, government, or public bodies
- fundraising or grant teams who recognise that design and proposals are political
- CBO leaders and community practitioners who want to challenge extractive design norms
- policy professionals, evaluators, and MERL practitioners who want to move beyond technical fix approaches
- people who want to redistribute power, not polish programmes
This isn’t just about learning. It’s about unlearning, redistributing, refusing, and practising differently.
What Makes Designing Otherwise Different
This is not a skills course.It is a practice lab.
Across eight weeks, we treat programme design, proposals, MEL, and budgets as political infrastructures, and we work with frameworks that are often kept at the margins of the sector.
You will engage with:
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Abolitionist thinking — distinguishing reformist fixes from non-reformist reforms
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Black radical imagination — treating imagination as a method, not a luxury
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Regeneration, not sustainability — moving from managing harm to repairing systems
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Doughnut economics — using limits as a design constraint, not a growth tool
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Data and knowledge sovereignty — including the right to refuse extraction
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Land and place — even in urban, digital, or humanitarian contexts
Community-based organisations are not case studies in this programme.
They are co-designers, critics, and knowledge-holders.
How the Programme Works
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8 weekly live sessions (90 minutes each)
- Starts Friday 5th June ( 08:00 EDT, 13:00 BST, 15:00 EAT, 16:00 UTC+4, 20:00 AWST). Click here for your time zone
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Cohort size: 15–20 people (intentional mix of institutional practitioners and CBO leaders)
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Co-facilitated with lived-experience and movement practitioners
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1 x individual coaching session (weeks 3–6)
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Weekly applied work using your real programmes or proposals
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Ongoing peer accountability and post-programme follow-up
- Post-programme peer accountability and follow-up — the cohort relationship doesn’t end at week eight
This is slow, relational learning — not content delivery.
Weekly Curriculum Themes
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Design as Harm or Care
From charity logic to abolitionist clarity: Expose programme design and proposals as technologies that can either organise abandonment or organise care. Establish abolitionist orientation and collective responsibility.
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Power, History & Non-Reformist Reforms :Working inside institutions without becoming them: Understand power historically and structurally. Learn to operate as constructively complicit - acknowledging we're inside extractive systems while actively redistributing power.
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Decolonisation, Land & Epistemic Sovereignty
Move beyond DEI toward land, power, and knowledge repatriation. Centre Indigenous and place-based governance logics. -
Participation or Theatre?
Build participatory processes that redistribute power — even under tight timelines. Distinguish genuine co-design from consultation performance. -
Proposals as Political Documents
Treat proposals as narrative battlegrounds. Learn strategic compliance, translation, and refusal. Understand when translation becomes co-optation. -
Accountability, Data & Refusal
Build accountability structures with teeth. Reclaim data sovereignty and the right to refuse extraction. -
Regeneration & Doughnut Design
Replace sustainability-as-management with regeneration-as-repair. Use doughnut economics as a constraint. Address the economic implications of doing less. -
Commitments & Afterlives
Move from learning to durable practice. Prevent extraction from the course itself. Create accountability infrastructure.
What changes
This programme will change how you understand what a proposal is — and what it’s for.
Practitioners who come through the Accelerator describe a specific shift: they stop optimising inside the system and start making intentional choices about where to push, where to refuse, and where to translate. That’s different from inspiration. It’s practice.
Before the Accelerator, people often describe:
- Writing proposals that sanitise their politics to be fundable
- Running ‘participation’ processes they know are theatre
- Holding design power with no real accountability for how they use it
- Sensing that something is wrong with how the work is structured but lacking the language or community to name it
After, they describe:
- Knowing the difference between a reformist fix and a non-reformist reform — and choosing deliberately
- Having a community of people asking the same questions, across contexts and institutions
- Being able to name deficit framing when they see it — in proposals, needs assessments, their own work
- Applying specific tools to their actual programmes, not hypothetical case studies
- Feeling less isolated inside their institutions, and more accountable to communities outside them
This is slow work. Eight weeks is a beginning, not a resolution. But it is a beginning built in community — and that is what makes it durable.
Faculty
Every session is co-facilitated with practitioners who are actively navigating the tensions the session covers — inside institutions, inside community organising, inside systems of funding and power. They are not here to deliver theory. They are here because they are doing this work, imperfectly and seriously, and have something real to say about it.
We don't invite people to perform diversity in a speaker lineup. We invite people whose presence changes the room.
Past guest speakers have included activists, evaluators, organizers, researchers, and community practitioners from across the UK, West Africa, the Caribbean, South Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East. A full faculty list for the June 2026 cohort will be shared with enrolled participants in advance of the programme starting.
Scroll down to meet some of our past guest speakers on our Research Design for Social Impact course.
