The Southeast Asia Acumen Fellowship

Overview

Acumen Academy is the community for builders grounded in moral imagination, solving problems of poverty. At Acumen Academy, we equip ambitious builders with the hard skills required to scale solutions to poverty and the harder skills of moral leadership to reimagine and build a better world. 

You’ve already done what most people never start. You’ve built something that works. You’ve proven it in the lives of the people you serve. But what comes next is a different challenge.

The Southeast Asia Acumen Fellowship is for social entrepreneurs at that turning point: leaders who have built a working model, demonstrated meaningful impact, and are driven by the ambition to reach far more people, and influence the systems around them.

Over 8 months, alongside a small cohort of Southeast Asia’s most ambitious builders, you’ll strengthen your leadership. You’ll gain the clarity, courage, and judgment needed to navigate growth while staying grounded in the people and communities you serve.

And when the Fellowship ends, the journey continues. You’ll join the Foundry, Acumen’s global community of more than 2,000 social innovators across 71 countries, committed to building a world based on dignity.

A different kind of leadership 

The thing no one warns you about growth is that the bottleneck is rarely the model. It’s the leadership.

As your work grows, the decisions get harder and lonelier. Investors push you to change what made the model work. Success starts getting measured in ways that have nothing to do with why you began, and you begin to face leadership challenges you didn’t anticipate.

The Acumen Fellowship is for this moment. Through the curriculum and a cohort of peers navigating similar questions, you’ll get better at the leadership that scale demands: holding your values steady under pressure, telling the story that moves capital and partners, leading through uncertainty, and defining success on your own terms.

This is what we mean by moral leadership. Not a set of ideals on the side, but the operating leadership capability that determines whether a social enterprise scales with, or away from, its purpose of solving problems of poverty.  

“The quality of the community makes the learning truly focused. This isn’t something you can do on your own. It’s not only about the content, but also the shared intention and support within the program.”    – Pin Kasemsiri, Southeast Asia Fellow

“This Fellowship provided invaluable opportunities for self-exploration, helping me understand my core values and the tensions I navigate. This introspection has cultivated greater empathy and renewed hope for the people I lead and the mission we pursue.” – Lindsley Jeremiah, Southeast Asia Fellow

What comes after: The Foundry 

The Fellowship is 8 months. The community is for life.

When you complete the Fellowship, you join the Foundry, Acumen’s global community of 2,000+ social innovators across 71 countries, whose work has reached more than 50 million people. It’s also a pathway to everything that helps a social enterprise scale:

Tools and coaching

Community

Amplification

A path to capital

What makes an Acumen Fellow?

• You’ve built something that works. You’re leading an organization that’s already delivering real, demonstrated impact against poverty. You have a bold, credible vision to reach many more people and change the systems around your work.
• You lead like the opposite of poverty is dignity. Your work gives people living in poverty the dignity of choice — in jobs, education, products, and services. You use the tools of business to build scalable, market-based solutions to solve problems of poverty and improve lives.
• You’re thinking beyond incremental growth. You’re impatient with the current status and committed to expanding your impact significantly. You’re not looking for someone to believe in your idea; you’re looking for the leadership, community, and perspective that will help you take a proven model further.
• You’re ready to grow as a leader, and to do it with others. You know scale will test you, and you want a cohort that will challenge you, hold you accountable, and walk the long road with you.

About the Fellowship

Grounded in two decades of accompanying social entrepreneurs from seed to scale, the Fellowship gives you new frameworks and a cohort to pressure-test them in real time, while navigating the realities of building and scaling an enterprise.

Curriculum

Polarity Management

Leadership is full of “both/and” problems with no clean answer. Learn to hold opposing demands in tension and still move people toward a shared goal.

Good Society Reading

Step back from the day-to-day to wrestle with what a just society actually requires, through thinkers from Plato to Amartya Sen to Chimamanda Adichie. Reflect on the questions that keep your growth honest.

Adaptive Leadership

Read your stakeholders, map what they need, and navigate the uncertainty that comes with each stage of growth.

Authentic Voice

Tell the story that makes investors, partners, and policymakers both understand and care. The skill behind every pitch, partnership, and round.

Structure

You keep running your organization the whole way through. The Fellowship is an 8-month hybrid program designed around a working founder’s calendar: a mix of virtual sessions, in-person immersives, and self-paced learning:

• One 5-day in-person orientation
• Two 5-day full-time in-person immersives
• Two virtual Learning Labs
• Self-paced learning between sessions
• Monthly one-on-one calls with the program team

On average, participants should expect to commit at least 2.5 hours each week to the Fellowship for the duration of the program. 

Acumen covers program costs, including travel and lodging for the in-person immersives.

The company you’ll keep

Across Southeast Asia and around the world, Acumen Fellows are building solutions that are transforming how people access healthcare, education, livelihoods, and opportunity. Many Fellows say this community is the most valuable part of the experience: a community of peers who challenge one another, share hard-won lessons, and understand the realities of building and growing organizations in complex environments.

Meet the leaders shaping Southeast Asia’s future


Jeff Barreiro, Founder & Executive Chairman of Mayani, is building a more inclusive agrifood system in the Philippines, where smallholder farmers have long struggled to access fair and reliable markets. Through Mayani, Jeff is building the infrastructure that connects producers with institutional buyers, strengthening livelihoods and creating a more resilient food system. 

Mayani now works with a network of more than 100,000 farmers and fisherfolk, with the ambition to deepen its impact and mobilize smallholders as agents of food security, climate resilience, and rural progress. Jeff considers his Acumen journey key to growing as a leader,  strengthening his confidence and communication, and finding a community that continues to support him as Mayani scales.



Linh Hoang, Founder & CEO of TeenCare, is reimagining how families navigate adolescence. What began as WeGrow, making comprehensive sexuality education more accessible to young people in Vietnam, has evolved into TeenCare, a parenting intelligence platform combining AI, behavioral insights, and human mentoring to help parents better understand and guide their children.

Today, TeenCare is expanding beyond Vietnam and building a new category of technology for families navigating adolescence. For Linh, Acumen’s influence came less from any single framework and more from the community and standard of leadership she encountered including relationships that continue to shape her leadership as both she and TeenCare grow.


Collective Action
Ayu Abdullah, Adrian Banie Lasimbang, and Natasha Allen are part of the Sabah RE2 Roadmap and Consortium, a community-led initiative expanding renewable energy access across more than 200 rural and Indigenous villages in Sabah, Malaysia. Working with the Sabah State Government and the Energy Commission of Sabah (ECoS), RE2  brings together community leadership, public policy and delivery to create a model that can scale. 

Through replicable micro-hydro and solar mini-grids, the consortium is expanding reliable energy access while helping establish mini-grids as critical climate infrastructure for last-mile communities. By connecting local knowledge, community ownership, and public-sector collaboration, the team is building a pathway to reach hundreds more villages across Sabah and, potentially, Southeast Asia. 

Driving Systems Change
Malnutrition remains a defining challenge for Malaysia’s children. One in five children under five is stunted, rising to about two in five among Indigenous communities. TUMBUH, Malaysia’s First 1,000 Days Initiative, focuses on the critical period from conception to age two to help break the cycle of growth faltering.

Through the Ministry of Health, Peter Gan convened a diverse-stakeholder workshop using a whole-of-nation approach and drew on the Acumen Foundry community to enrich the dialogue. Joelle Pang, Hartini Zainuddin, Pam Guneratnam and Andrew Kok joined the discussion, bringing different experiences, perspectives and networks that connected national policy with community knowledge.

This collective effort connects government stewardship with community expertise and social enterprise solutions, dismantling traditional sectoral silos to build a more coordinated national response to childhood stunting. Through TUMBUH, the initiative aims to reach families in need, strengthen support during the first 1,000 days, and advance health equity for children across Malaysia.

Meet more Foundry members

We know you’re busy, so we keep the process respectful of your time through these four steps:1

1 Prepare for your application

2 Submit your application

5 October – 6 December, 2026

3 Join the Selection Conference

27-28 February, 2027

4 Start the Fellowship

April, 2027

Info sessions

Learn more about the application process for the Fellows Program in Southeast Asia, the profiles we are looking for, the requirements and more information.

Join

Learn more about the application process for the Fellows Program in Southeast Asia, the profiles we are looking for, the requirements and more information.

Join

Learn more about the application process for the Fellows Program in Southeast Asia, the profiles we are looking for, the requirements and more information.

Join