Since 2017.

The GVN Founder Wellness Pact.

In 2017, after losing two founders in our community to suicide within a single year, leaders of accelerators across our network made a shared commitment to the people in their programs. It has guided our work ever since. The Collective is that commitment, grown up.

We introduce founder wellness at the start of every program, so the topic is on the table from day one.

We look honestly at our own culture and name the behaviors our programs may be promoting that hurt the people in them.

We educate ourselves on the signs of depression so we can recognize them early.

We listen to our founders regularly and keep an open door to the leaders of every program.

We hold a weekly, off the record conversation where founders can be honest about how they are doing, personally and professionally.

We give every team a coach or counselor, or the resources to find one.

We celebrate the small wins of every founder.

We promote real balance between a founder’s work and rest.

We dedicate one full day of every program to founder wellness, away from the office.

We encourage founders to ask for help when they are struggling, and we mean it.

Three chapters of the same work.

The Pact began in 2017 as the GAN Founder Wellness Pact, written with accelerator leaders across our network and paired with free counseling sessions for any founder in a member program. In 2020 it was followed by the Founder Support Fund, an evergreen microgrant fund for founders’ mental and emotional health during the hardest stretch of the pandemic. The Founder Wellbeing Collective is the third chapter, and the permanent one. You can read the original Pact as it was first published.

Run a program? Add your name.

Any venture organization, whether an accelerator, a venture studio, or an innovation hub, can become a Pact signatory. Signatories commit to the ten practices above, are listed publicly on this page, and receive a signatory mark for their own site. Signing costs nothing. It is simply a promise, made in public, to the founders in your care.

If this is a crisis.

The Collective is coaching and community. It is not crisis care. If you or a founder you know is in crisis, in the United States call or text 988 for the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. Outside the United States, you can find your country’s crisis line at findahelpline.com. Please reach out. It matters that you are here.