Mentor Matching

The Social Innovation Forum (SIF) launched its 4th annual Social Business Accelerator on January 19, kicking off 12 intense weeks of programming for the six social impact businesses in the cohort. Curious about what goes on in an accelerator? Interested in learning more about impact investing? We’ve launched this blog series, Insights into Impact Investing, to offer a glimpse inside our Social Business Accelerator and share some of our learnings from our work in the emerging field of impact investing.

Finding the right mentors can be critical to the success of an early-stage business and mentorship is at the heart of the SIF Social Business Accelerator approach. Recognizing the importance of the mentor-entrepreneur relationship, we devote an entire session to what is essentially a version of mentor-entrepreneur speed-dating. During this session, groups of 1-3 mentors rotated every 20 minutes to meet individually with entrepreneurs as well as other mentors.

After the meetings, mentors and entrepreneurs indicate their interests and the SIF team makes the matches. In some cases, it’s a 1:1 match. In others, mentors work with multiple companies and companies have multiple mentors, depending on their needs. Ultimately, the SIF approach is highly customized, allowing entrepreneurs to access the support they most need to accelerate their progress. Mentors and entrepreneurs will work closely together over the next 10 weeks to answer critical business questions, make valuable connections, and prepare to pitch to our community of impact investors.