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.
Get StartedPower, 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:
Abolitionist thinking
distinguishing reformist fixes from non-reformist reforms
Black radical imagination
treating imagination as a method, not a luxury
Regeneration, not sustainability
moving from managing harm to repairing systems
Doughnut economics
using limits as a design constraint, not a growth tool
Data and knowledge sovereignty
including the right to refuse extraction
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.
Not a skills course. A practice lab – built across four interlocking dimensions.
01 — POLITICAL DEPTH
Transformation
You don’t just learn new frameworks. You change how you understand the work you’re already doing – and the power you hold inside it.
- From optimising inside the system to making intentional choices about where to push and refuse
- From performing participation to redistributing actual decision-making
- From managing harmto repairing systems
02 — GLOBAL COHORT
Space to think & connect
A small, intentional cohort of 15–20 people. Slow, relational learning with practitioners across institutions, contexts, and geographies
- INGOs CBOs foundations
- Policy teams academics
- UK Global South diaspora
- Co-facilitated with movement and lived-experience practitioners
- Peer accountability built in
03 — RADICAL FRAMEWORKS
Frameworks kept at the margins
We work with the thinking the sector rarely funds or names – because it asks harder questions about who holds power and what counts as knowledge.
- Abolitionist thinking
- Black radical imagination
- Doughnut economics
- Data & knowledge sovereignty
- Land and place-based logics
- Epistemic refusal
04 — PRACTICE LAB
Applied to your real work
Every session is applied to your actual programmes, proposals, and budgets – not invented scenarios or hypothetical case studies.
- Weekly applied tasks on your real programmes and proposals
- 1:1 coaching between weeks 3–6
CBOs as co-designers and knowledge-holders - Post-programme peer accountability
Community-based organisations in the programme:
Not case studies. Co-designers, critics, and knowledge-holders — whose presence changes what gets made.
HOW THE PROGRAMME WORKS
- 8 weekly live sessions (90 minutes each)
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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
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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
Week 1
Design as Harm or Care From charity logic to abolitionist clarity
- Map your current programme or proposal against a harm/care framework — identifying where abandonment is being organised in the name of help
- Build a shared vocabulary for abolitionist programme design that you can use immediately with your team or funders
- Leave with a design orientation — not just a critique, but a starting position
Week 2
Power, History & Non-Reformist Reforms Working inside institutions without becoming them
- Use a structural power analysis tool to locate yourself honestly inside extractive systems — and identify your actual room to move
- Learn the non-reformist reform framework to distinguish changes that open up more possibility from those that close it down
- Draft one concrete power-redistribution move you can take within your current role or organisation
Week 3
Decolonisation, Land & Epistemic Sovereignty Beyond DEI toward knowledge repatriation
- Audit your programme's knowledge infrastructure — whose frameworks are governing, whose have been erased
- Apply Indigenous and place-based governance logics to at least one design decision in your current work
- Leave with a practical repatriation checklist that goes beyond representation
Week 4
Participation or Theatre? Co-design that redistributes power, even under pressure
- Use a participation audit tool to honestly grade your current engagement processes against a power-redistribution standard
- Learn a set of facilitation moves for genuine co-design that work even within tight donor timelines
- Distinguish between the conditions that make co-design possible and those that make it performance — and know what to do in each
Week 5
Proposals as Political Documents Strategic compliance, translation, and the right to refuse
- Reframe a proposal and budget you're currently writing as a political document — surfacing what it argues for, against, and erases
- Practice strategic translation: how to say what you mean inside language that funders will fund
- Identify your own lines of refusal — the point at which translation becomes co-optation — and how to hold them
Week 6
Accountability, Data & Refusal Building accountability structures with teeth
- Design an accountability structure that serves your communities first — not your funders' reporting requirements
- Learn data sovereignty frameworks and the practical conditions under which refusal of data extraction is legitimate and defensible
- Leave with a data governance one-pager you can adapt for your organisation
Week 7
Regeneration & Doughnut Design From sustainability-as-management to regeneration-as-repair
- Apply doughnut economics as a design constraint to your programme — what falls outside the safe and just space, and what does that demand of you?
- Work through the economic implications of doing less: slower timelines, smaller reach, deeper impact
- Build a regenerative logic model that replaces extraction with repair as the core organising principle
Week 8
Commitments & Afterlives From learning to durable practice
- Build a personal accountability infrastructure that outlasts the course — with named people, timelines, and consequences
- Identify where the project/initative itself might be extracting from you and your community, and how to prevent that
- Leave with a commitment document that is specific, political, and witnessed
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.
Chiedza Chinhanu
Scholar-activist specialising in performance and social change.
Mara Tissera Luna
international consultant focusing on displacement and protection responses in Latin America and the Caribbean
Christopher “Talib” Charriez
Senior Program Coordinator with the New Jersey Scholarship and Transformative Education in Prisons Initiative (NJ-STEP)
Samual Quiles
Case manager and system impacted scholar with a passion for global and racial justice.
Marie Williams
CEO of Dream Networks CIC, Chartered Engineer, PhD researcher, TEDx speaker and Design Lecturer
Siza Dube
Reimagining the world with black feminisms
Sophie Bray-Watkins
Youth advocacy and engagement. War Child UK