Theory of Change

Participants will first look inward, identifying how their existing expertise, networks, and lived experience translate into strengths they can use as a founder. A policy veteran’s understanding of regulatory environments is a competitive advantage. A nonprofit leader’s community trust is a form of capital. If you’ve come from the federal landscape or nonprofit world, there is no need to feel that you need to catch up to “real” founders. Let’s build from your genuine strength.

Navigating uncertainty is a learnable skill, not a personality trait. This component of our work will help you build the adaptive capacity you’ll need when your assumptions are challenged (which they will be, repeatedly).

The dominant business model is extractive, and ventures are built for speed, scale, and maximizing financial returns for shareholders. At BTI, we believe that impactful, regenerative models should build to strengthen our communities and facilitate long-term economic, environmental, social, and democratic sustainability.

Financial viability serves the mission, not the other way around. We will introduce the various components of the traditional business model canvas and explore how innovators can flip the script on its head.

We will work with participants to help them develop a clear understanding of the resources that exists within the impact ecosystem and how they can best prepare to access them.

Participants will learn to move beneath the surface of social and environmental problems by mapping the relationships, feedback loops, and structural conditions that produce them. (Think about viewing homelessness as a housing shortage versus seeing it as an outcome of interlocking systems around land use policy, mental health infrastructure, wage stagnation, and racial wealth gaps.) By mapping the system, a potential founder will have a better sense of where they can potentially intervene and why.

Participants will explore a structured tool used to distinguish root causes from systems and effects, identifying leverage points that call for innovation. Leaning on the Problem Tree Framework, originally designed in the 1960s, participants will also develop a topic-specific vocabulary and repeatable method for problem diagnosis that they will be able to bring into community conversations, partnership discussions, and funding applications.

Drawing on systems thinking traditions, participants will collaboratively explore areas where relatively small interventions could produce disproportionate change. These ideas are the seeds from which impactful ventures emerge.

BTI will bring to light business models and funding mechanisms that are explicitly designed for transformation: cooperative structures that distribute ownership, blended finance models that attract capital without extractive terms, and alternative exit strategies that help to prioritize community benefit over time.

At BTI, we believe that an innovator’s positionality, or the social and political context that defines an individual’s identify and shapes their perspectives, biases, and power within society, is a strategic asset that can help shape venture design. Participants will be challenged to identify not just what the system requires but what their own personal background, relationships, and positionality equip them to do within it.

Participants will identify a problem that they are personally positioned to address. This means they have proximity, relationships, or contextual knowledge that gives them a genuine advantage and ensures the work done to address it has real-world roots.

Taking a step beyond the the high level systems mapping in Step 2, participants will map the system surrounding their chosen problem. Moreover, they will identify what a meaningful shift would actually require, prioritizing systems analysis over program design.

We will work closely with participants as they begin the psychological shift from identifying as a practicioner or professional to becoming a founder and innovator. Additionally, we will promote efforts to design for partnerships from the outset. We recognize that systems-change ventures are inherently collaborative, and that trying to own the whole solution is both strategically weak and often extractive.

Innovators will design a pilot that is scoped to test a specific assumption about their initiative, reflecting an act of intellectual discipline. The question won’t be “what would my full venture look like?” but “what is the smallest meaningful test that would tell me whether my core assumption holds?”

Through this program, BTI will work with innovators to explore funding structures suited to their specific venture type, including CDFIs, program-related investments, revenue-based financing, community investment notes, philanthropic blended structures, and the governance implications each carriers. The goal here is capital literacy that is both honest and strategic.

Building on an honest knowledge of the capital landscape, BTI will work with innovators to not only tell a compelling story but to enter funding conversations as informed counterparts. Innovators will understand what funders are optimizing for, where mission alignment is genuine versus performative, and how to negotiate terms that preserve the integrity of their initiative.

For many innovators, BTI may serve as an on-ramp to the rest of the entrepreneurial ecosystem including, but not limited to, both traditional and impact-focused accelerators.