Accelerating
Your Impact

The Altruist Accelerator: a supportive community of nonprofit leaders, staff, volunteers and changemakers who are ambitious to grow their organization’s impact.

How is the Altruist Nonprofit Accelerator unique? 

While our program is inspired by the most successful business
accelerators, the Altruist Nonprofit Accelerator:

  1. helps you solve the unique governance, program and revenue challenges of 501(C)3 organizations;
  2. helps nonprofits of all sizes and stages of maturity, not just startups; and
  3. accepts nonprofits of all mission types, including social justice, the arts, education, health, human services, environment, and others. 

What is an accelerator?

There are hundreds of business accelerators in the private sector, but no more than a handful in the social sector. Read this for a short overview of the space, and see Y Combinator for one of the first and most successful.

Is the Altruist Accelerator right for you? Find out: Click here for a complete FAQ. Click here for an outline of the curriculum. And if you still have questions, reach out.

Donald Summers

Founder & Executive Director
"Altruist Partners, the management consulting firm I founded in 2006, has catalyzed dramatic gains in growth and impact for a long list of nonprofits across the US and around the world. Now we've founded a nonprofit arm, this Accelerator, so my team and I can share what we've learned with the entire social sector in a way that's both effective and affordable. Join us. Let's make the world a better place."

Donald has led over fifty successful nonprofit and social enterprise accelerations from the local to the global level in the fields of education, human services, health, environmental reform, and public media. Results include over $1 billion in new earned and contributed revenue, dramatic gains in organizational performance, and program impact directly improving the lives of millions. A frequent speaker and widely published author, his most recent publication is Scaling Altruism: a Proven Pathway for Accelerating Nonprofit Growth and Impact (Wiley, 2024). He is a graduate of Middlebury College and Harvard University.