Are you a social innovator?
You may be an aspiring startup founder, or a concerned citizen who wants to solve a problem in your own community, or simply someone who cares about social justice—
you are a social innovator and you are welcome here 🥰
We believe that any individual has the capacity to be an agent for positive social change in their own communities.
What is your biggest dream for your community?
Do you see some challenges in your community that you want to address? Are you an entrepreneur for social impact? Makesense Academy will support your biggest dreams and turn them into long-term solutions!
We aim to assemble an army of innovators creating solutions in their own communities to address local issues.
The Academy: Makesense’s 6-month Incubator
There are no shortcuts to success, only great strategies.
With our Academy experts, tailored mentorship, and community-movement approach, we’ll guide you through the mountain so you can create real lasting change that can impact the world without any cost.
Get guidance and support from our Library of Resources and the people in the Academy community.
Work with and learn from other social entrepreneurs and share what you know to them as well.
Educate and influence your audience on the social issues that your enterprise is solving.
Your enterprise will be funded P60,000 throughout the 6-month Incubation Program.
Meet the innovators of Academy Batch 3!
AUDEO: Revolutionizing the housing industry & reducing plastic in the Philippines!
CareGo: Achieving vaccine equity through technology, one community at a time.
Hear the stories of our award-winning alumni!
Frequently Asked Questions
Hackathons are 2-day, 2-hour, or sometimes online workshops that train aspiring innovators on the skills they need in order to start laying the foundations of their organization or startup. It is here that ideas go from ideas to tangible project plans and designs.
Design Sprints is a midterm program dedicated to supporting innovators in creating their first prototypes of developing their minimum viable products/services. Here, you will be assigned a dedicated coach to check on your progress and give you targeted mentorship coupled with the training workshops you will receive each week.
Yes! The Hackathons are designed to have brainstorming workshops to help you come up with the most exciting and creative project ideas. We recommend that if you’re coming in without a specific idea, you at least prepare what kinds of socio-environmental problems you would like to address.
Absolutely! We welcome people of all ages and backgrounds in our programs. We recommend that you sign up for the Hackathons. It will give you a great first look into the process of social innovation, while also giving you the training to start brainstorming your own ideas.
No, all of makesense’s incubation programs as 100% free. In fact, one of the incentives for completing and excelling in the 6-month Academy program is a monthly allowance of Php 10,000. Learn more about the 6-month Academy program here.
Hackathon 1: Non-profit, non-business ideas is for changemakers who want to turn volunteer-powered projects into formalized organizations. If your goal is to create an entity like UNDP or formalize your student organization so that it can operate outside of the university, then this Hackathon is for you!
Hackathon 2: For-profit ideas is for changemakers who want to develop sellable products or services that address social or environmental issues. If your goal is to create a social enterprise like Rags2Riches which provides low-income mothers with an alternative livelihood through craftsmanship, then this Hackathon is for you!
The makesense Academy supports idea-stage solutions. That means that your solution can still be in its earliest phases of development, and we will provide you the tools and training in order to be market, investor, and community ready.
The Academy also supports non-profit, non-business types of solutions. This is because we believe that volunteer-driven solutions and youth movements are innovations in themselves and deserve the same training and support as their social enterprise counterparts in order for these organizations to continue to grow.
Lastly, the Academy is 100% free. We acknowledge that creating a startup is hard enough as it is, even moreso if the startup is trying to address societal problems. To foster a worry-free environment and to show the belief that we have in our innovators, the programs are not only free, but the 6-month incubation program even grants a 10,000 PHP monthly allowance to its participants.
It’s not a need, but it will be helpful to you as a founder in the long-run. Having teammates as early as now makes the journey less daunting, more exciting, and more manageable as you go through the ups and downs of starting your own social enterprise or organization. If you don’t have a team yet, we recommend you join the Hackathon. If you have a team already, you may opt to apply for the Design Sprint instead.
None for now. We’ll make an announcement on our Facebook and Instagram pages for our upcoming activities. The Academy utilizes a mix of synchronous and asynchronous activities to be kind to everyone’s time and pace.
We discourage teams from joining other programs while they are part of the 6-month incubation program of the Academy. The Academy requires a big level of commitment that may not be met if teams are participating in other programs. We also want to avoid learnings not being applied or workshops not being attended to because of schedule conflicts with other programs.
