---
title: Charity Incubator
group: Funding
order: 2
summary: Investigate gaps and existing work, plan a cohort of projects and track experiments, milestones and hand-off decisions.
status: live
statusNote: Live local incubation software is available. No organization, funded cohort, recruited founder or independently verified result is created by using it.
conditions: [symptom-trap, fragmentation]
firstMilestone: A published gap report naming three gaps the research has found, each checked for whether an existing organization could fill it.
help:
  - Open an issue labeled program pointing to a gap that you think no organization is filling.
  - Tell us which existing organization already fills a gap the research names.
  - If you run or advise an incubator and could partner, open an issue labeled program.
related: [/record/gap-map/, /open-problems/the-fragmentation-question/, /programs/cause-census/, /programs/methods-lab/]
sources:
  - title: Ambitious Impact
    publisher: Ambitious Impact
    url: https://www.ambitiousimpact.com/
    note: The launch count is the organization’s own figure, from its home page.
---

## Use the operational planning software

Use the [incubator desk](#partner-workspace-charity-incubator) to document a gap search, existing organizations and partnership alternatives before proposing a new project. Move project codes through discovery, design and learning; record experiment rules before results and preserve a route to hand-off, merger or closure.

The workspace includes separate institutional-readiness records. Those records track what responsible people still need to establish; they do not grant approval or verify a legal, funded program. The longer-term charter below remains an institutional proposal.

Save each form, inspect the generated kit and export a backup. Your records stay in this browser. Imports are validated, destructive changes offer undo and newer work from another tab is protected. Fictional examples contain no real commitments, participants or results.

## What it is

Research sometimes finds a gap: a problem with a promising approach and nobody working on it. The Charity Incubator would fill such gaps, preferably by helping an existing organization take the work on, and only as a last resort by launching a new one.

## How it works

Every candidate gap would go through three checks. Is it real? It has to appear on the [Gap Map](/record/gap-map/) with its evidence. Is anyone already working on it? The program would search public registries and ask the field. Could an existing organization fill it with some help? Only when those checks point the same way would the incubator recruit founders, help them design the work with the people it would serve and support the first years.

Research-led incubation has been done before. Ambitious Impact runs an incubation program that gives founders researched charity ideas, training and help finding seed funding, and it reports having launched more than 60 charities. Charitology would bring its own lenses to the search: gaps at every level of the [depth scale](/method/#depth) and gaps that only some moral frameworks can see.

## Why it matters for the system

If the [Symptom Trap](/diagnosis/symptom-trap/) is real, work on sources stays thin partly because few organizations are built to do it. When the research finds a gap upstream, someone has to build the team that works on it.

The incubator also has to respect the [Fragmentation Problem](/diagnosis/fragmentation/). Every new organization adds a board, a budget and a fundraising effort to a crowded field. That is why launching comes last, and why helping an existing organization grow, merge or take on a program counts as success.

## Risks and limits

An organization can outlive the evidence that justified it. The incubator would set an evaluation point for every organization it helps start, with a plan to merge, hand off or close if the work doesn’t hold up. Until partners, funding and a proper legal and governance setup are in place, the program accepts no money.

## What success looks like

Within five years of starting, most of the gaps the incubator takes on are filled by organizations that already existed, and every new organization it launches has a published evaluation. At least one source-level gap has a team working on it.