Program & Alumni Updates | December 2022
Cohort 8 Graduation
Our outgoing Cohort 8 graduated in the last week of Aug 2022 in an inspirational gathering of CSI Partners, donors, and supporters from the wider development community. The key attraction of the Soiree’ were short individual video presentations highlighting the work of the cohort with CSI Partners sharing their experiences of mentoring our social entrepreneurs. View the cohort videos here.
Selection of a new Cohort
This year we received over 800 applications for our programs. After a rigorous process that included the submission of a detailed B-Plan, detailed telephonic conversations with The/Nudge Social Entrepreneurship team, and 1:1 video interviews with CSI Partners, we selected 10 organizations for the incubator and 8 organizations for the accelerator. 4 organizations also made it to year 2 of the accelerator.
Know more about the incubator cohort here and the accelerator cohort here.
We are also very grateful to our donors Sabre, Meta, Mphasis, and Statestreet for believing and backing our latest cohorts of social entrepreneurs.
Did you know
The/Nudge SocEnt team has put in over 3 months to select their first livelihood cohort!
Kick Off Bootcamp
Our first-ever livelihood cohort began its journey with a Kick-off bootcamp in Bangalore. The 4-day bootcamp (5th to 8th September 2022) saw the participation of 22 organizations.
The founders and their CXO teams were exposed to a burst of inspiration with Amarindra Sahu (Co-founder Nestaway), Gayathri Vasudevan (Co-founder, Labour Net) and Ramakrishna NK (Founder, Rang De) sharing their journeys of entrepreneurship.
The Incubator cohort attended workshops and speaker sessions on areas like Strategic Clarity, Financial Planning, Technology for nonprofits, and the various models of collectives. On the other hand, the Accelerator cohort un-learnt and re-learnt through sessions and workshops on M&E, Design Thinking, Working with the Government, and Organisation building, to help scale their journey forward.
Awards and Achievements
- Mantra4Change got nominated for the Collective Social Action award by the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship.
- Kanksshi Agarwal, founder of NETRI got featured in Mint’s 100 women entrepreneurs list.
- Karya, WAIC, and FMCH won awards at the Data for Good Exchange or D4GX 2022, a collaboration between Dasra and Bloomberg for using data to drive impact.
- Intelehealth has been recognized as a winner of the Global Digital Health Innovation Awards 2022 for "developing Innovative, Accessible & Affordable product/service to transform healthcare".
- Siddhant Sachdeva, Namya Mahajan, and Vishal Sunil, three of Ekho Foundation’s co-founders were included in the Forbes Asia 30 under 30 list. The fourth co-founder Azeez Gupta was selected for BW 40 under 40.
- Vigyanshala was declared winner of the global science engagement competition - Falling Walls Engage, from a pool of 1000+ applicants, and was invited to Germany to present and compete for the breakthrough of the year award.
- Priya Krishnamoorthy’s article (founder, 200Million Artisans) that examines the lack of support for informal creative businesses, and suggests ways to empower these enterprises and the communities they serve, was voted as NextBillion’s “Most Influential Article of the Year 2022”.