Holding hards

Design for Social Impact Accelerator

Next cohort starts September 2025

Depending on interest, this course will also be available in French, Spanish and Arabic- register your interest below!

Dismantling Systems. Rebuilding Futures. Leading Change.

 

The Status Quo Isn't Working

This is an 8-week immersive journey for social impact leaders, program designers, and funders ready to reimagine how change happens. You’ll gain the tools to build initiatives that center equity, redistribute power, and drive real, community-led transformation.

Who Should Join?

This program is designed for those working at the intersection of social change, funding, and design. You should apply if you are:

  • A nonprofit or grassroots leader struggling to make programs truly community-driven
  • A philanthropy professional rethinking how funding can be reparative, not extractive
  • A service or UX designer ready to shift from "designing for" to "designing with"
  • A policy advocate or researcher committed to dismantling systemic oppression
  • A social entrepreneur designing models for economic and racial justice

This isn’t just about learning—it’s about unlearning, rebuilding, and shifting power in real time.

What Makes This Program Different?

🔹 Learn From the Frontlines – Every week features insights from people with lived experience in system failure and change-making.

🔹 Real Stakes, Real Change – Work on actual case studies tackling systemic inequities in real time.

🔹 Deep Personal Reflection – Examine your own positionality, biases, and power in the design process.

🔹 Liberation Frameworks – Master intersectionality, anti-oppressive methodologies, and equity-centered design practices that shift power back to communities.

Join the waiting list 

Just add your name and email to stay updated

What you can expect from the course, and us:

The Design for Social Impact Accelerated is not your standard online program. This 8-week immersive learning journey is designed to equip you with innovative tools, fresh perspectives, and actionable skills to transform program design and drive meaningful social change.

This course offers you the unique opportunity to join a global community of peers committed to integrating critical, anti-oppressive design.

Here’s what makes this program stand out:

  • A Comprehensive 8-Week Structure: Weekly 1–1.5 hour live online sessions, including a 1:1 coaching session supplemented with independent learning activities, all grounded in equity-centered design thinking, anti-oppressive practices.
  • Practical, Real-World Examples: Learn how to embed equity-centred program design within resistant organizations and navigate challenges with sceptical funders.
  • Creative and Participatory Methods: Gain hands-on experience with participatory, trauma-informed and culturally- responsive design techniques and collaborative analysis.
  • Flexible Learning: Engage with course materials through self-led readings, reflection exercises, or live interactive webinars tailored to different learning styles.
  • Focus on Equity and Power: Explore critical topics like power dynamics and anti-oppressive approaches to social impact program design through discussions, case studies, and peer learning.
  • Interactive, Peer-Led Learning: Experience dynamic, interactive sessions that prioritize peer collaboration over traditional lecture-style teaching.
  • On-Demand Access: Can’t make it to a live session? Webinars will be recorded and available for you to revisit or catch up at your convenience.

This course is designed for changemakers who are ready to move beyond extractive methods and embrace participatory, equity-driven practices in their work.

By the end of the course, you will come away with:

  • A Deep Understanding of Equity-Centered Program Design: Master the language, frameworks, and conceptual tools to integrate equity design principles into your work. For example:
  • ✔️ Anti-oppressive program design toolkit
    ✔️ Community engagement strategy template
    ✔️ Intersectional analysis framework 
  • ✔️ Stakeholder mapping templates
    ✔️ Decision-making matrix for equitable choices
    ✔️ Conflict resolution frameworks
  • Hands-On, Practical Experience: Apply theory to practice by tackling real-world challenges with guidance from a team of experts who bring decades of experience in social justice work, advocacy and community-led change.
  • ✔️ Program redesign blueprint
    ✔️ Community accountability plan
    ✔️ Resource redistribution strategy
  • A Personalized Action Plan: Develop a tailored strategy to incorporate Design for Social Impact’s eight guiding principles into your projects and professional work.
  • ✔️  Pedagogies of Care, Wellbeing and Solidarity
  • ✔️ 1:1 30 minute Coaching session
  • A Lifelong Learning Community: Join a dynamic network of peers committed to equity and justice. 
  • ✔️Access to a global network of change-makers
  • ✔️Alumni sessions & mentorship opportunities
  • ✔️Ongoing resource-sharing platform

Learn From Those Reimagining Program Design

At Design for Social Impact, we believe in platforming systems-impact leaders who are reshaping how social change happens. As a social enterprise, we are committed to amplifying voices that challenge the status quo and push the boundaries of equity-centered program design.

Each week, our carefully curated global faculty shares firsthand experiences of integrating anti-oppressive approaches into social impact work. These conversations go beyond theory—they offer real-world insights into how nonprofit leaders, funders, and designers are shifting power, centering community voices, and building liberatory alternatives to traditional program models.

We are continuously expanding our faculty to bring you the most cutting-edge and transformative perspectives. Scroll down to meet some of our past guest speakers on our Research Design for Social Impact course.

 

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

Course Breakdown: Designing for Liberation and Regeneration

This is not just a course—it’s a movement toward systems transformation. Over eight weeks, we will challenge dominant paradigms, center community wisdom, and build regenerative, abolitionist approaches to program design.

Week 1: Deconstructing Power in Design

Disrupt traditional design paradigms that reinforce hierarchy and exclusion
Map power dynamics within your organization and sector
Engage in radical self-reflection to examine bias, privilege, and complicity

Week 2: Intersectionality as Praxis

Move beyond tokenism—design programs that actively dismantle oppression
Integrate multiple lived experiences through participatory methodologies
Design for complexity—embrace fluid, adaptive models over rigid frameworks

Week 3: Community Power, Co-Design & Organizing

Shift from ‘design for’ to ‘design with’—co-create alongside communities
Center organizing principles to build sustained movements, not just programs
Distribute decision-making power—shift control to those most impacted

Week 4: Pedagogies of Care, Abolition & Solidarity

Apply abolitionist thinking to program design—move from reform to transformation
Build frameworks for collective care and solidarity beyond the nonprofit industrial complex
Integrate healing-centered approaches that acknowledge trauma and resilience

Week 5: Circular Economies, Environmental Justice & Economic Liberation

Connect social justice to ecological justice—move beyond extractive models
Apply circular economy principles—design regenerative and waste-free initiatives
Embed economic redistribution strategies that shift resources and power

Week 6: Radical Learning, Experimentation & Emergent Strategies

Embrace failure as transformation—iterate based on community insights, not funder demands
Develop feedback loops that are non-extractive and accountable to those impacted

Practice mutual accountability through peer-led evaluation and storytelling

Week 7: Anti-Oppressive Design & Decolonial Futures

Dismantle oppressive design logics embedded in mainstream program development
Center indigenous and ancestral knowledge systems in problem-solving
Co-create liberatory design principles rooted in autonomy, self-determination, and repair

Week 8: From Theory to Action – Building Systems That Last

Develop your personal liberation framework to guide future work
Create accountability structures that prevent mission drift and co-optation
Build long-term, community-led initiatives that outlast funding cycles

This is program design beyond the nonprofit playbook—grounded in abolitionist principles, mutual aid, ecological regeneration, and radical reimagination and led by systems-impacted practitioners. Are you ready?