DESIGN FOR SOCIAL IMPACT LAB
We work with the people who design social impact work.
We work upstream.
Most efforts to make this sector more just concentrate on delivery, on how a programme runs once it already exists. By then the decisive choices have been made: where the problem was located, who counted as an expert, what would be measured, and who would be paid.
Those choices live in proposals, budgets and evaluation frameworks, and they are made by a relatively small number of people who mostly do not believe they hold any power at all. Programme designers, grant writers, evaluators, and the funders who set the terms they write to.
Change how those people work and you change what the sector funds. One programme designer writes dozens of proposals across a career, and every one of them builds something.
WHAT WE DO
We teach. Cohort programmes for practitioners, applied to the real proposal, budget or evaluation in front of you rather than to invented scenarios, and co-facilitated with people who are inside these tensions themselves.
We advise and coach. Non-financial support designed for foundations and their grantee partners, equity audits, programme design advisory, and one-to-one coaching for people working out what they can move from where they stand.
We give the tools away. An open-access library of guides and videos, free to any community organisation under a Creative Commons licence. Parity pricing by location on everything we sell, and funded places on every cohort.
WHAT WE DO
Design for Social Impact Lab is a social enterprise working at the intersection of philanthropy, participatory programme design, learning and evaluation, and social justice. We draw on abolitionist, decolonial, Black radical and regenerative frameworks, and we work from inside the sector's own contradictions rather than at a distance from them.
Designed with, not for
Lived experience is a form of expertise. Our programmes are built and facilitated with people who have been on the receiving end of aid, policy and research, which unsettles the usual story about where authority sits.
Parity pay and parity pricing
Rates adjust by location and funded places run on every cohort. We pay our facilitators and collaborators properly for their labour, because that is what decides who ends up in the room. It is structural, not optional.
Named from the inside
We say we, not they. We have written the proposals we critique and sat on the funding side of the table, and political sharpness that cannot survive contact with a real budget is not much use to anybody.
GET STARTED
Designing Otherwise Accelerator
Our eight-week flagship, for practitioners who design programmes and write proposals and are ready to reckon with the power they hold. Next cohort Q2 2027.
Designing Learning for Impact
Eight weeks for the people who hold learning, monitoring and evaluation in community-rooted organisations. Leave with a learning agenda and a learning journey your partners can actually walk. Next intake Q3 2027.
Coaching: Room to Move
One-to-one coaching for practitioners working out what they can move from inside an institution, or planning to leave and build a consultancy or social enterprise of their own. Opening 2027.
Non-Financial Support for Foundations
For funders resourcing their grantee portfolio. We design the support around your partners' actual contexts, rather than around your reporting cycle. Three tiers from £9,000 to £45,000.
