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Acumen Academy

The World's School for Social Change

The World's School for Social Change

Build Hard Skills and Character

Create an entrepreneurial vision and the skills to build it without losing sight of your values and ethos.

Deliberately Diverse

For leaders who work across lines of difference including race, class, gender, ethnicity, and religion.

Locally Rooted, Globally Connected

For anyone, anywhere who wants to make a difference

Doing what’s right in a world that loves easy

The world’s school for social change.

A university re-imagined for a world that needs all of us.

Our mission is to unleash a new generation of social innovators and leaders with the determination and grit to build a more just, inclusive and sustainable world.

At Acumen Academy we define success not on how the privileged fare but on how the poor, vulnerable and the earth are treated.

Acumen Academy is unique.

It’s a place where new role-models and business models are created and celebrated.

Where competence meets character, practical skills meet moral imagination and urgency meets action.

We serve a community of social innovators and builders who are willing to embrace the challenge of solving the world’s toughest problems. Acumen Academy provides the practical tools, practices and resources needed to create new solutions for an interdependent world. Ultimately, our shared ethos, our commitment to life-long accompaniment and the unleashing of human energy within our communities will serve a future for all of us.

We all have a role to play.

Embrace the challenge.

80

%

of course takers say their ability to create social change has improved

Timeline

Timeline

Our Manifesto

It starts by standing with the poor, listening to voices unheard, and recognizing potential where others see despair.

It demands investing as a means, not an end, daring to go where markets have failed and aid has fallen short. It makes capital work for us, not control us.

It thrives on moral imagination: the humility to see the world as it is, and the audacity to imagine the world as it could be. It’s having the ambition to learn at the edge, the wisdom to admit failure, and the courage to start again.

It requires patience and kindness, resilience and grit: a hard-edged hope. It’s leadership that rejects complacency, breaks through bureaucracy, and challenges corruption. Doing what’s right, not what’s easy.

Acumen: it’s the radical idea of creating hope in a cynical world. Changing the way the world tackles poverty and building a world based on dignity.