Applications open for Echoing Green Fellowship Program

The Echoing Green community is multi-generational, multi-racial, geographically diverse, and cross-class. Through collective action and a multi-sectoral approach, they believe they can progress faster toward dismantling oppressive systems worldwide.

Through the Echoing Green Fellowship, they find innovators, mobilizers, community organizers, and social justice leaders working on a plan to make the world better in a big way. Then they help them grow their impact by connecting them with the tools, resources, and communities they need to bring their ideas to life.

Echoing Green supports leaders to:

• Build and shift power
  • They support proximate leaders who are disrupting the status quo by shifting power dynamics. The best innovators use their clear understanding of the problem to develop the sharpest solutions. They look for leaders who show how their idea will shift power to the people most impacted by the outcomes of their enterprise.
• Resource intersectional approaches
  • Trying to understand inequality through a single identity can lead to misunderstanding its impact and exclude people from solutions. They look for leaders who build solutions with an intersectional understanding of how social identities, including gender, sexuality, ethnicity, disability, and class, intersect with race to differently shape people’s experiences in the world.
• Fuel radical imagination.
  • The community is inspired by the idea that collectively, they can help build a world that has yet to exist—where all people can thrive. Radical leaps of imagination can power social movements and transformational change. They invest in leaders who are motivated by what they can imagine, embrace bold ideas, and are ready to draw upon a legacy of change-making that is visionary and courageous.

Benefits

• Capacity Building
  • Leadership Development
    • A comprehensive program to build and grow leadership skills and develop the strategies needed for ideas to thrive.
  • Wellness and Wellbeing Support
    • Ongoing support focuses on mental and emotional wellbeing along with self-care workshops designed specifically for the struggles of entrepreneurship.
• Capital
  • Expert Resources
    • The programs team facilitates the Fellow experience and connects these leaders to experts and opportunities according to their needs.
  • Seed Funding
    • A stipend over 18 months (80,000 USD). Funding offered to for-profit organizations is in the form of recoverable grants.
• Community
  • Virtual and In-Person Convenings
    • Gatherings to connect Fellows within and across classes, regions, and communities to build strong ties among Fellows over their entrepreneurial journey.
  • Expert Support
    • A suite of pro-bono support from leading professionals to build organizational capacity and help navigate the social innovation field.
    • Opportunities to connect with experienced business leaders committed to supporting positive social change globally.

Who they’re looking for?

• Together, they strive to build a world that has yet to exist: a future free from racism and its far-reaching consequences where all people can thrive.
• This Fellowship is for people whose enterprises are at an early stage and who are experts on the challenge they’ve chosen to confront. They seek leaders who reflect the community they serve and bring deep knowledge of the issues into their work as they co-design solutions with and for their communities.

Eligibility Criteria

• Applicant Eligibility
  • Echoing Green Fellowship applicants must be 18 years or older by June 1, 2024.
  • To be eligible for the Fellowship and fully participate in programming and support offerings, you must be able to communicate in English proficiently. Support throughout the Echoing Green Fellowship is offered in English.
  • They use the term “original founder” to describe people who launched or are launching an organization that is their original idea. You cannot have assumed a leadership position within the organization after its founding. To be eligible, you must be a leader with decision-making power within the organization and be either 1) a sole founder or 2) a leading founder on a team of people who created the organization.
  • To be eligible for an Echoing Green Fellowship, applicants must be the primary decision maker and have the ultimate authority over your organization’s growth and strategic vision.
  • If selected for an Echoing Green Fellowship, you may hold other professional responsibilities, but you must work full time, defined here as 40 hours a week, on the work outlined in your Fellowship application, and it must remain as your main professional priority.
• Organization Eligibility
  • Organizations that are independent but have fiscal sponsors are eligible for the Echoing Green Fellowship as long as the fiscal sponsor has no authority over the organization’s work and decision making.
  • To be eligible for an Echoing Green Fellowship, you must be able to make and act on organizational decisions of your own choosing. If other organizations or entities manage or hold decision-making authority for your proposed organization, you may not be eligible. Organizations that are independent but have fiscal sponsors may be eligible as long as the fiscal sponsor has no authority over the organization’s work and decision making.
  • Echoing Green seeks applicants in need of funding to initiate or scale their organizations. They generally describe early-stage organizations or ideas as those that 1) have operated with full-time staff for less than five years or 2) still need resources to grow and sustain their operations. Organizations that already have all of the following in place may not qualify as early-stage enough for the Echoing Green Fellowship: a well-defined program model; an initial strategic plan; basic organizational infrastructure (like a bank account, payroll, job descriptions, etc.); a staffing plan; initial funding sources; and a board of directors that meets regularly to manage organizational governance. If you do not have all of these elements in place yet, you may still be in your startup phase and eligible to apply for an Echoing Green Fellowship.
  • Per the U.S. Internal Revenue Service, Echoing Green cannot distribute funds to organizations whose primary purpose is lobbying. Lobbying is defined as activities that seek to support specific political candidates, specific political parties, or urge action on specific legislative bills. Issue-area advocacy, defined as the attempt to cause political action using methods such as civic education and public campaigns, is not considered lobbying. For more details, please reference the IRS definition here: irs.gov/charities-non-profits/lobbying.
  • To be eligible for an Echoing Green Fellowship, the organization cannot engage in recruitment, promotion, or conversion for a specific religious faith to your constituency. If your organization’s work has a spiritual element or works with existing faith communities but does not promote or recruit on behalf of that faith, you may be eligible.
• For you and your organization to be eligible for an Echoing Green Fellowship, no founding team members and no people in a leadership position can be an Echoing Green Fellow.

For more information, visit Echoing Green.