Please read this before answering the application questions below. Thank you.

Confidentiality. Everything you provide is kept 100% confidential. You are entering a protective cone of silence where candor and “confronting our brutal reality” are prized behaviors.

Honesty. This is not a grant application where you put just your sunny side out. Please speak honestly about what’s working with your organization and what isn’t.

Style. We like plain language and short sentences.

Eligibility. The curriculum is tailored for organizations with annual budgets between $50,000 and $10m. Typically, organizations should have completed at least three fiscal years of operation and achieved a minimum of $500,000 in annual revenue in the most recent fiscal year to be eligible. However, we will consider exceptional applicants of all sizes and stages of development.

Time Cost. 4-6 hours/week for 10 weeks plus a final presentation “Demo Day.” This breaks down to one 2-3 hour session with the cohort and approximately 1-2 hours of reading and talking with your CEO partner, whom you will pair up with at the first session.

Commitment. Be prepared to show up prepared. Do the reading and complete the short assignments. This Accelerator is highly collaborative, so participants who arrive unprepared will constrain the progress of others. Participating organizations must commit to 100% attendance from a) their CEO and b) their Board Chair or other member from their executive committee.

Board Member Attendance. This program will give many new tools and frameworks to CEOs, and it’s critical that a board member also stay involved and aware to keep governance informed and aligned and working as a team with management. You are welcome to split up the sessions between your board members, but we need a firm commitment that your board members will commit to being present and absorbing the materials to help inform and align the other board members. (Importantly, board members will get everything they need just from the session – they can get away with skipping the reading and short assignments, although the best progress will come if they are fully involved and engaged.)

Optional Attendee. Participating organizations may also bring a third participant from their executive staff team for one or more of the sessions. For example, a CEO may wish to bring the Program Director for the session on program strategy and metrics, and then bring the Chief Development Officer for the session on revenue. While the third participant may be the same person or rotate at the discretion of the CEO, each organization is limited to a total of three participants for any given session (CEO, Board Member, a select individual from the executive team).

Resources. All sessions will be recorded and all curricula housed within a learning management system so each CEO can share the session recordings and materials with other staff and board members when they are ready.
Partners. Each CEO will be paired with a partner CEO from another organization for learning and reflection. In addition to attending the weekly Saturday sessions, we ask participants to debrief with their partner CEO between sessions around one or two key reflection questions.