Making a community impact in the nonprofit space is hard work; replicating the model to recreate that impact for a different com munity can feel like swimming into turbulent seas and being deposited unceremoniously back on shore only to go back and do it again and again. But this Fall, five community building nonprofit leaders are getting a boost from UpTide.
Nonprofit accelerator UpTide is leveling up community-building nonprofits through funding, strategy, and the tools they need to achieve greater impact. The accelerator culminates in January 2026 with a week in New York where they will present their organizations at Showcase Day for a chance at additional funding.
In addition to an enhanced skill set, the leaders will finish UpTide with a network of coaches, men tors, and peers, a three-year strategic plan to scale, and a $5,000 unrestricted grant.
This opportunity didn’t just happen in a vacuum, it’s a product of 92NY, its Social Impact arm the Belfer Center, and SEED SPOT. For 150 years 92NY has been tap ping into the power of arts, ideas and community to change lives and repair the world. Since 2013, the Belfer Center has helped foster an environment where communities work together to find solutions to the problems that affect all of us. SEED SPOT’s mission is to educate, accelerate, and invest in diverse entrepreneurs who are working on solutions to social problems.
So how does 350 applicants get curated down to five members of a cohort? Belfer Center Advisory Committee Chair and Former Executive Director, Rebekah Shrestha noted the cohort shared some common characteristics. “Their missions and impacts align with UpTide’s community building goals,” she explains. “The leaders are known and respected in their community and have deep ties to their community’s problems, and to solving them.” Critical to the process was how ready the organizations were to scale.
Disability Lead is an example of an organization that was definitely ready for the next level. They are working to increase civic engagement and diverse leader ship in the Chicago and greater Pittsburgh regions by growing a network of disabled leaders in the spirit of the ADA. The organization features three programs that build upon each other: Institute, Network, and Connections.
Institute is a professional development program for aspiring leaders and change makers who identify as disabled/people with disabilities. There are no specifics when it comes to job titles, and they welcome everyone from community activists to corporate employees and everything in between. It’s about tapping into disability identity and leadership skills to create a more inclusive world.
Completing the Institute or having an application accepted will get leaders into the Network. It features 250+ fellow disabled leaders supporting each other in places of power and influence, networking events, mentorship, disability rights and civic engagement training, access to conferences and training, and more.
Network members are eligible for Connections wherein Disability Lead helps connect Network members and therefore disabled perspectives into leadership spaces to help facilitate solutions to social problems. 80% of members have advanced professionally or civically since joining Disability Lead.
A great example of this is Emily Blum. An Institute Fellow in 2018, she was named CEO of Disability Lead in 2019. Blum cites her experience in the Institute as amazing. “It was transformational to be in a room where so many others have the same experiences across work, life, and friendship, and be united by disability where we had so much in common despite supposed differences.”
Blum notes Disability Lead has become a pipeline for great leaders with disabilities. “I think we are disrupting how people understand leadership and who gets to be a leader.” One of their acceleration goals is to be in 10 cities by 2040.
“UpTide got us,” Blum explained. “They didn’t try to pigeonhole us as a social service organization, they saw us as a justice and power building organization and will connect us with a network that does too.” It takes strong engaged communities to build better tomorrows. UpTide and its cohort are the building blocks of better tomorrows.