In 2021 the Hello World team asked themselves, along with the community of systems changing social entrepreneurs, partners, and other thought leaders, what the most pressing need and exciting opportunities were in our sector. The Ecosystem Accelerator emerged from those conversations and thanks to Zalando, a partner that has supported us from the beginning. 

By then Hello World had carried out 14 accelerators across 17 countries in Europe and Latin America, helping +120 social innovators to scale their initiatives. From that experience, we found that the most powerful, desired and effective support we could provide to social entrepreneurs was when we brought them together with key stakeholders in their particular topic who had the power and energy to create change. In these spaces, the different players started to build a shared understanding of key issues and root causes, where innovations (mainly brought by the social innovators) could be applied, and how they could work together to implement changes at scale. This led us to dream of a different way of carrying out an accelerator: one that was focused on a topic or sector (an “ecosystem”) rather than an individual solution, and that brought together the key stakeholders from the beginning to build the accelerating solutions together, rather than one entrepreneur having to go out and convince others. 

We are thrilled to embark on a new journey and partner up with IKEA Social Entrepreneurship  to launch Hello Accelerator, a global platform to accelerate impact in the field of migration. We will bring together social entrepreneurs, civil society organizations, business leaders, policymakers, academics, and media to explore, build, and implement solutions that drive socio-economic inclusion for migrant talent in Europe and Latin America.