Echoing Green’s 2022 Fellowship: Call for Social Innovators advancing Racial Equity

Deadline: 3-May-22

Echoing Green’s 2022 Fellowship is seeking social innovators advancing Racial Equity with the best ideas for social transformation. The 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 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, they believe they can progress faster toward dismantling oppressive systems worldwide. The following principles guide the work.

Echoing Green supports leaders to:

Build and shift power. They support proximal 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.
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.

Eligibility Criteria

Applicant Eligibility
- Echoing Green Fellowship applicants must be 18 years or older by February 28, 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 re main 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.
- Per the US 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.
- 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.