Deadline: 7-Feb-23

The Echoing Green is pleased to announce the 2023 Fellowship to help build and shift power in their communities, drive inclusive and intersectional solutions forward, and fuel radical leaps of imagination that transform systems and power social movements.

This Fellowship is for people who are experts on the challenge they’ve chosen to confront and whose enterprises are at an early stage. They seek leaders who reflect the communities they serve and bring deep knowledge of the issues into their work as they design solutions with and for their communities. They strongly encourage leaders from anywhere in the world who identify as Black, Indigenous, or a person of color to apply for the Fellowship.

Echoing Green works where social justice and social innovation meet, backing bold leaders who believe in upending unjust systems. They seek people with the best ideas for social transformation and do everything they can to help them succeed.

One of the greatest threats to building a world where all people thrive is racial injustice and they believe social innovation is an important tool for addressing this head-on. They’re committed to building upon their 35-year track record of finding, investing, and connecting some of the world’s best social innovators to ensure that the social innovation field directly contributes to advancing racial equity globally. Echoing Green Fellows connect across their experiences, whether they are working on access to education across Michigan, digital equity in Accra, environmental justice in Brazil, or Indigenous sovereignty across the world. 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.

Guiding Principles

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

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 intersectional1 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.
  • Their 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.

Who they are Looking for?

• Echoing Green supports bold leaders from all over the world who see possibility in the face of the most existential challenges of their day. 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

• You do not need to be based in the United States or be an American citizen. They encourage applicants of all nationalities, working in any country, to apply for the fellowship. Echoing Green does not sponsor American work permits for any foreign nationals.
• Applicant Eligibility
  • Echoing Green Fellowship applicants must be 18 years or older by August 8, 2022.
  • 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:
    • a sole founder or
    • 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:
    • have operated with full-time staff for less than five years or
    • 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.
  • 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.