The Region

Accelerator is focused on the 10 counties that make up southwestern Pennsylvania (Allegheny, Armstrong, Beaver, Butler, Fayette, Greene, Indiana, Lawrence, Washington, and Westmoreland). We emphasize collaboration, coordination, communication, and participation with others in the region-nonprofits, service providers, funders, investors, and other community stakeholders.

Our Ventures

We work with a select group of regional nonprofits that are launching or operating earned income ventures to advance their nonprofit missions. These organizations, through a well-defined evaluation process, have been accepted into the Accelerator's portfolio, often after being recommended by an area foundation or other stakeholder. These ventures are provided with direct and indirect support (at no cost to the organizations).

We typically work directly with our ventures for several years and invest significant resources into these relationships, which is one reason our due diligence process for portfolio acceptance is so thorough.

Our Area of Interest

Accelerator's focus is on earned income and innovative approaches to tackling our region's more pervasive social problems. We believe that social enterprise is one of a number of strategies that can be employed by socially innovative organizations to provide financial vitality and sustainability to social impact efforts that deliver meaningful value and impact to our community. We have a unique process and system to engage ventures and we use and adapt established tools, diagnostics and practices to help our ventures achieve measurable outcomes.

The National Innovation Initiative defines innovation as the intersection of ideas and implementation, leading to the creation of social and economic value. We like this definition and we define that "value" as field-tested, financially sustainable social impact backed by credible research.