Early-Stage Social Entrepreneur Ecosystem

Why early-stage social entrepreneurs?

Panorama Global is committed to lowering barriers for social change leaders and supporting them to effectively launch and sustain projects. This work is crucial for:

Sowing the seeds of change

All investment-worthy organizations start in the early and idea stages.

Serving underserved changemakers

While a handful of competitive fellowships and fee-for-service programs exist, the majority of early-stage social entrepreneurs are boot-strapping their work in isolation. Those from historically excluded communities face additional barriers to launching social change initiatives.

Sparking innovation

Innovation often comes from new organizations.

Fueling cross-sector change

Social change organizational structures and financial models vary based on mission and unique strategic needs.

Achieving impact

Many world-changing ideas dissolve – not because of merit, but because of lack of funding and access to resources.

Scaling change

Social change organizational structures and financial models vary based on mission and unique strategic needs.

Early-stage social entrepreneur defined (ESSE): A mission-driven organization or initiative in the nascent stages of organizational development. This can include a variety of legal organizational structures and financial models such as nonprofits, for-profits, fiscally sponsored organizations, 501(c)4s, and time-bound initiatives.

Limitations of the Current Ecosystem

The fragmented social entrepreneurship ecosystem does not offer much financial, educational, or community-building support explicitly tailored for early- or idea-stage organizations. As changemakers begin to stretch from subject matter expert into the role of Executive Director/CEO, they typically have three limited levels of support available to them: 

Free but competitive support. As each fellowship or funder typically supports 10-20 founders, this leaves the larger landscape of early-stage social entrepreneurs unserved.
Support for a fee. As many social entrepreneurs are financially constrained, this support is only an option for those with means and privilege.
The do-it-yourself (“DIY”) option. The majority of early-stage social entrepreneurs fall into this category.

Shortening the Learning Curve

The Accelerating Social Change Leadership initiative, thanks to the partnership of the Phillips Foundation, has shortened this steep learning curve for changemakers in the first five years of launching their initiatives, and created access for the large majority of under-served founders. This work has happened at the individual, organizational, and ecosystem-wide levels with an emphasis on experiential and social learning and prioritizing changemakers from historically marginalized communities. Read more about our first cohort of early-stage social entrepreneurs.

Identifying the needs of social entrepreneurs

Our work has identified the needs of early-stage social entrepreneurs across multiple levels.

Individual early-stage social entrepreneurs benefit from relationships and peer learning.

As individual founders are often working in isolation, they benefit from peer learning and relationship building. Our peer learning communities nurture essential leadership “intangibles” like solidarity, community, motivation, and normalizing failure. They also demonstrate the power of social learning.  

Mindset Development: 91% of the time peer learning participants agreed sessions supported mindset development and mitigated harmful social impact narratives.
Community building: 98% of the time, peer learning community participants felt seen and heard by facilitators and peers.
Efficacy of social learning: 98% of responses indicate sessions were a meaningful use of time and they learned something new.

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Early-stage social entrepreneur organizations benefit from growing operational skills.

Social entrepreneurs often work through the process of launching their initiative themselves—trial-and-erroring and boot-strapping their way through learning and understanding fundraising, operations, and implementation, discovering new information and new resources over time. It’s challenging for them to access best practices for organizational management, growth, and change. One-on-one coaching addresses this gap and supports organizational development by growing skills across high demand areas:

Fundraising
Board management
Grants
Communications

Thanks to the power of learning from others and from first-hand experience, 98% of the time, our cohort members have felt ready to implement the organizational management skills they learned in their coaching sessions.

The ecosystem benefits from open-access knowledge sharing.

The Accelerating Social Change Leadership initiative is committed to creating more equitable access for early-stage social entrepreneurs of all backgrounds, identities, and lived experience. In 2024, we partnered with early-stage social entrepreneurs and seven entrepreneur support organizations to create SPARK: the Social Purpose Action Resource Kit.

Now, early-stage social entrepreneurs no longer have to win a competitive fellowship or the networking lottery to access the learning resources they need. SPARK is an open-access, vetted hub of resources made by and for changemakers launching social impact initiatives across the U.S. It hosts:

250 priority topic resources
150 support organizations
Events
Custom guides
An AI bot to answer questions and connect early-stage social entrepreneurs with resources

However, early stage social entrepreneurs need more than a shortened learning curve to launch and sustain social change initiatives. Early-stage social entrepreneurs are over-mentored and under-funded. To launch new initiatives and create sectoral shifts, we must address this funding gap across all levels of need.

Early-stage social entrepreneurs need more than a shortened learning curve to launch and sustain social change initiatives. The ability to launch, sustain, and deliver impact in their work is limited until they receive funding. Panorama is excited to share our vision for how to address the funding gap for early-stage social entrepreneurs at the individual, organizational, and ecosystem levels.

Cohort funding creates access at the individual level

Our cohort model has been successful and we’re looking to build upon it. In addition to continuing one-on-one coaching and peer learning communities for our cohorts, we have the audacious goal of providing $200,000 in direct, unrestricted funds to each participating early-stage social entrepreneur. This would allow for entrepreneurs to meet their self-determined needs like full-time salaries, childcare, testing a pilot program, etc. This is especially important when serving entrepreneurs from historically marginalized communities, who are often beginning entrepreneurship from a less-resourced position.

Learning opportunities unlock organizational capital

Learning opportunities should be accessible to all and used as tools to unlock access to funding. We envision two paths to this important work:

Develop an open-access MVP certification process for early-stage social entrepreneurs. An MVP, or minimum viable product, is an essential part in validating an idea and minimizing investor risk. Once the certification process is completed, early-stage social entrepreneurs will have access to a pool of funding or a part-time operational staff member (like a Chief of Staff or Fundraiser). Investors will also gain access to a pipeline of vetted social change initiatives. Our research and network has indicated that family foundations especially appreciate this benefit, as it reduces their level of effort.
Consolidate existing and open funding opportunities on SPARK. SPARK currently provides fundraising education like how-tos and best practices, which are essential for ecosystem-wide learning. However, organizations also need a one-stop-shop to locate the funding opportunities available to them so that they can grow their cash flow. SPARK is an ideal platform for this work, as its open-access, collaborative, uses AI to connect changemakers with the most relevant resources.

Shifting funder norms grows the total ecosystem funds available

We cannot ask individual changemakers to compensate for broken systems. Ecosystem-level funding strategies must be implemented. With this in mind, Panorama is committed to creating funder learning and action to best support early-stage social entrepreneurs and increase the total funds available.

Funder learning opportunities: Leveraging successful peer learning models deployed by Panorama from the Accelerating Social Change Leadership initiative and Collaborative Learning for Impact Philanthropy (CLIP), Panorama is well-positioned to create a funder collaborative and guide on how to best support early-stage social impact organizations.
Funder action: Panorama envisions a philanthropic pledge where 5% of available funds are committed to social change organizations in the first 0-5 years of launch.

Join us in building a world where early-stage social entrepreneurs from all backgrounds and lived experience can learn, earn, and lead change.

As we move towards the next phase of the Accelerating Social Change Leadership initiative, we are guided by the question:

What would our world look like if the early-stage social entrepreneurs facing the most barriers were mentored and sufficiently funded?

We’re determined to find out and invite you to partner with us in this essential work.

Social Entrepreneur Ecosystem