Four Mindsets That Accelerate Nonprofit Growth

Our organization, One Acre Fund, was founded in 2006 to provide agricultural technologies, nuance, training, and post-harvest support to smallholder farm families in Africa, with the aim of helping them become more prosperous. We started with 38 families, and after 14 years of good rains and droughts, new farm technologies, and ancient crop diseases, we recently achieved the milestone of 1 million families served annually in our program. Reaching this scale has not only directly impacted many more families’ lives, but also created a strong platform from which to improve underlying agricultural systems.

Here, we reflect on four mindsets we used to set targets, develop financial models, measure our impact, and build an organizational culture that helped us achieve this exponential growth.