Echoing Green seek leaders who bring deep knowledge and passion to designing solutions with and for their communities.
Donor Name: Echoing Green
Country: Global
Type of Grant: Fellowship
Deadline: 02/07/2023
Details:
Fellows are lifelong members of Echoing Green’s community and work across issue areas to advance equity, including education, climate justice, human rights, health, and more.
Leader Criteria
As a social innovator, you are more than your business plan. They ask questions to learn about your leadership based on the following categories:
- Leadership Qualities: Showcase your ability to drive ideas forward, build support for your vision, and lead an organization toward its goals. Strong application responses will include concrete examples that demonstrate each of the following:
- Your ability to build and manage an organization toward strategic goals
- Your skill at building coalitions or partnerships to further your mission or goals
- How you have gathered and mobilized resources or support toward a cause or mission
- Purpose Alignment: Through your application responses, show why you hold deep conviction and passion for the issue you are committed to addressing. Echoing Green seeks out leaders who are dedicated to solving the problem, even if their organization’s form shifts over time. In your responses, clearly and compellingly demonstrate:
- Why you choose to undertake and lead this work
- Why you’re motivated to pursue addressing this issue long-term
- Why you feel compelled to address this issue at this particular moment in time
- Relationship to and Expertise on the Issue: Social innovators who are closest to their communities possess the ideas and insights to affect the greatest change—your proximity is one of your most significant assets. In your answers, showcase:
- How you reflect the community you serve and bring deep knowledge of the issues into your work
- How you design solutions with and for your community and proactively involve those impacted by the issue in your strategy and decision making
- How your leadership will shift power to the people most impacted by the outcomes of your enterprise
Organization Criteria
While your business plan may evolve, they want to know about the foundational thinking that drives your approach to this work. In your answers, you will be asked to share concrete examples and be scored on how well you demonstrate the following:
- Innovation: Tell them how your idea is innovative and as a result will bring about dramatic, not just incremental, change. As you share your plans for your organization, compellingly demonstrate:
- How your idea improves or builds upon an existing model, introduces an existing model into a new context or another form of innovation
- How your idea challenges assumptions and tests out new approaches
- Your awareness of others’ work. How your idea differs from previous solutions and how your work can contribute to a coalition of organizations trying to achieve similar goals
- Changing Systems Social innovators know that big problems require audacious thinking, even when the solution is simple. Share how your proposed solution can directly impact many lives, shift a community’s trajectory, or change a system and structures. High scores will include concrete answers that illustrate:
- How your idea addresses the root causes of the system you are addressing
- How your approach brings an intersectional analysis to societal problems and accounts for multiple and compounded forms of oppression to yield a new, improved, and sustainable outcome
- Your understanding of the forms of power that influence the issue you are addressing
Eligibility Requirements
- Applicant Eligibility
- Will you be 18 years or older by the time you begin the Fellowship?
- Echoing Green Fellowship applicants must be 18 years or older by August 8, 2022.
- Are you able to communicate proficiently in English?
- 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.
- Are you an original founder or a leading member of your proposed organization’s original founding team?
- 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.
- Are you the primary decision maker for your 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.
- Will you be able to work full time on your proposed organization throughout the 18-month Fellowship?
- 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.
- Will you be 18 years or older by the time you begin the Fellowship?
- Organization Eligibility
- Does your proposed organization have a parent organization?
- 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.
- Does your proposed organization operate independently and autonomously from your parent organization?
- 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.
- In your personal assessment, would you describe your organization or idea in the “early stage” of its development and in need of financial and non-financial resources to become sustainable?
- Echoing Green seeks applicants in need of funding to initiate or scale their organizations. We 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.
- Does your organization use lobbying to further its mission or goals?
- 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.
- Does your organization promote or recruit for a specific religious faith?
- 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.
- Have you or any members of the organization’s founding or leadership team previously received 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.
- Does your proposed organization have a parent organization?
For more information, visit Echoing Green.
