Accelerating Impact: Highlights from Our 2025 Regional Impact Accelerators

Enactus students often find their projects getting stuck. Some teams remain in the ideation stage without moving into action. Others believe they can’t proceed without financial support. And many are held back by a lack of clarity or specificity in defining the problem their project aims to address.

This year, we were set on helping our students get over all barriers that stop their projects from creating impact. For this reason, this year’s Regional Impact Accelerators were designed to address these barriers head-on through immersive design thinking-inspired masterclasses.

Across each session, students explored how to uncover the root causes of social and environmental problems, develop strategic partnerships, build financially sustainable models, and apply “borrowed ideas”, AKA, adapting proven solutions from other contexts to strengthen their own innovations.

We hosted our Regional Impact Accelerators (RIA) across Nottingham, London, Newcastle and Dublin, bringing together over 130 Enactus students from over 40 universities across the UK and Ireland. These interventions were designed to help teams strengthen and scale their innovative social enterprises through equipping students with the practical skills and tools to accelerate their project’s impact.

Impact

In reviewing student feedback and data on the impact of our session, we identified a clear pattern. Before the session, teams expressed a strong need for clarity on next steps and on what success looks like, highlighting by a 68% of students lacking a clear direction for action and common goals such as:

“having a clear plan for the future”

“Understand what makes a successful Enactus Project”

After the session, students’ confidence in recognising what “excellent” looks like from an Enactus perspective rose from 42% to 93%. With a further 99% of students leaving the session with clear knowledge of their next steps. This shift is reflected in comments such as:

“Now I know exactly what a great Enactus project looks like,”

“It [RIA] got us thinking about how to make our project actually work.”

In this sense, our RIAs effectively met student’s need for conceptual and structural clarity about excellence and direction.

Furthermore, feedback from students has been outstanding! 100% of students said they would recommend the session, and overall confidence and clarity grew dramatically, with an average 52% improvement across key areas. The RIAs also provided our Changemakers a unique opportunity to interact directly with corporate volunteers and mentors, gaining real-world perspectives on innovation, teamwork, and leadership in practice.

Through our RIA, we continue to get closer to our goal to shape the next generation of responsible leaders. Whether a student joins Enactus to enhance their CV, develop professional skills, expand their network, or compete nationally, all of these goals are achieved through one unifying focus: creating meaningful impact through their Enactus team project. By empowering students to lead with purpose and think creatively about the current day challenges, we’re shaping our changemakers to lead the way towards a more sustainable future.

A massive thank you to our partners at SAP and Sodexo for helping us host this year’s RIAs, and to our insightful volunteers who spared their time and expertise with out Changemakers. Your collaboration helps turn these learning experiences into moments of real inspiration and growth.