What we do
Our Programmes
Two programmes, one shape. A few days of teaching, then three months of coaching, delivered inside the communities themselves and paid for by us rather than by the people taking part.
mini-MBA
Four consecutive days, two hours a day, in cohorts of no more than twenty-five. Owner managers learn to price, plan, sell and read their own numbers, then keep the support for three months of coaching afterwards.
Graduates carry on meeting each month in group workshops that cut across cohorts, which is where most of the crowd sourced problem solving actually happens.
Participants average 45% revenue growth and 97% profitability growth.
Numu
A two-day bootcamp in agile and systems thinking, then twelve weeks of coaching while participants run a real change project in their own community, with no budget and no permission required.
Led by Peace Through Prosperity in Türkiye and Jordan, including inside the Baqa’a refugee camp, and developed with Change Craft.
Delivered pro bono.
Why they are built this way
Teaching is the cheap part
Anyone can run a workshop. The difficulty is the eight weeks afterwards, when the new practice is awkward, the first experiment has failed and going back to the old way costs nothing.
So both programmes put the short, intense teaching at the front and spend most of their effort on the months that follow. Cohorts stay small enough that we know everyone by name.
We take no grants. The programmes are funded by the founders, friends of the organisation, the team, and a small number of corporate sponsors, which is why we can keep them free at the point of use and refuse to scale them faster than we can coach.
Also running
Accelerate, an experiment
Accelerate takes design thinking and agile training to tech and non-tech startups founded in marginalised communities, delivered remotely. Teams work through Scrum, the IDEO design thinking framework and Mobius, a framework agnostic canvas for holding several practices together.
It has drawn less interest than the other two and we have kept it deliberately small while we work out whether remote delivery can carry the coaching relationship that makes the rest of our work function.
Everything is open
The full mini-MBA curriculum, the concept papers and the original street cobbler research are published for anyone to take, translate and run without asking us first.
Get involved
Run one of these where you are
If you work with micro-entrepreneurs or with young people in a place where opportunity is thin, we would like to hear from you. If you would rather fund the work, under one hundred US dollars sustains an entrepreneur for three months.