Building a Fellowship:
Early Lessons from the Firetree Senior Fellowship
As we connected with communities and social change organizations across Asia, we would come across experienced and values-aligned leaders who were in a key transition phase in their careers and were looking to build their next initiative. Many of these senior leaders would feel pressured to pitch an idea right away for funding or find academic scholarships or freelance consultancies that would help tide them over financially while they explored their new idea. In this transition phase, some leaders may struggle with feelings of insecurity and isolation as they venture beyond the community and identity of their previous work. This was the initial insight that led us to explore if we could support leaders who are in a transition phase of their social impact work through a fellowship programme.
The Firetree Senior Fellowship is a one-year flexible fellowship programme for experienced leaders who are building their next initiative. As part of the fellowship program, Firetree Fellows are invited to participate in a series of online and in-person mentorship and learning sessions. Stipends and project testing funds are also offered to fellows on a case-by-case basis.
In this post, we hope to share some early lessons that we have learned in our process of designing and launching the fellowship. We acknowledge that we are by no means experts on this topic and are only in the early stages of implementing our programme. We are sharing these lessons in the spirit of transparency, shared learning, and to hold ourselves accountable as we continue to evolve the programme.
Learning from Others
In late 2021, as we contemplated how we could support senior impact leaders who are exploring a new idea, our first step was to reach out and learn from other existing leadership and fellowship programmes that we admired. We are truly grateful to the institutions who were willing to share their insights and challenges when it comes to supporting social impact leaders. We were able to connect with eight inspiring organizations from around the world who represented a wide range of leadership support models. These included the following groups (with some remaining anonymous):
- Social Change Initiative
- Symposium on Strength and Solidarity for Human Rights
- Mira Fellowship
- MacArthur Fellowship
- Wolf Willow Institute
- Edmund Hillary Fellowship (Yoseph Ayele, Co-Founder and former CEO)
- Ashoka Fellowship
As agreed with these institutions, we have included in this blog post aggregated and anonymized insights from our conversations with them.
Lessons on Finding Fellows
Quality versus Quantity. A common piece of advice we received from the existing fellowships was to think carefully about how we design the fellow selection process. What is the most efficient process that would help us connect with the kind of leaders we are hoping to support? Some fellowship programmes use the number of applications received as a metric of success. But we should not underestimate the amount of time it takes for our team to thoughtfully review a candidacy or the time it takes for a nominee to engage in the review process with us.
For the pilot cohort of the Firetree Fellowship, we decided to rely on nominator networks to surface potential candidates since values-alignment was one of our key criteria. Rather than an open call for applications, we felt that, for this cohort at least, trusted nominators could best help us screen for this criteria while balancing time commitments. We recognized that in the pilot phase of this programme, the process and criteria may still evolve. Even our early conversations with nominators led to transformative insights about our fellowship criteria. Therefore, we opted to start with a smaller scale of outreach as we set-up and refined our systems.
Benefits & Challenges of Trust-Based Networks. Trusted nominators and existing partners are easy to work with because they know Firetree and the kind of leaders we support. In fact, they have surfaced some great potential fellows. However, working within our existing trust-based networks comes with its own challenges. For example, it surfaced internal questions about inclusion, how diverse our networks are and whether we are making this opportunity available to the leaders who need it the most. Are we building a space for exploration, new ideas, and creativity or are we reinforcing an echo chamber? These questions led to an internal commitment to being proactive and reaching out to new nominators. We will do this over time as we refine our criteria and objectives for the fellowship. We hope that the alumni of the fellowship will eventually become nominators as well.
Other Reflections on Inclusion. Our fellow search highlighted common inclusion challenges that the other fellowships mentioned. These include internet connectivity — as more sessions are being held online — and language as English fluency is being required for multi-country fellowships. As we’ve learned from other fellowships, we also saw the value of being flexible in the ways that we receive nominations and information from candidates. Some people prefer written formats while others are more comfortable with oral and story-based communication.
Be clear about what you are looking for and what you are not looking for. As we reached out to nominators in search of potential fellows, we’ve found that it is helpful to be specific not just about what you are looking for but to also give examples of candidacies that would not be a fit for the fellowship. In the beginning, we experimented with including sample “fellow personas” in the nominator materials but received mixed results. On the one hand, the examples helped spark ideas and surfaced nominations. On the other hand, the personas somewhat limited the nominators’ interpretation of the criteria and subsequently the pool of potentially eligible candidates that came to mind.
Lessons on Designing the Fellowship Experience
Balancing Structure & Flexibility. At first, we had planned to run the fellowship as a cohort-based model with one intake per year and the cohort engaging in a predetermined set of group learning sessions for that year. We quickly realized that this was not going to work if we wanted to support social impact leaders who are in a transition phase in their careers. Some leaders may need a few months to close their previous commitments, while others are in need of a community of support right away.
So rather than having one cohort intake per year, Fellows are able to join on a rolling basis, when it makes sense for them. We’ve found that this flexibility is much-appreciated and much-needed by the leaders.
The type of support and mentorship we provide is also tailored to each individual’s needs and context. One of the early feedback that we are receiving about our fellowship engagement is that we have to find a balance between structure and flexibility. The fellows do find milestones and timelines to be helpful in managing their workflow and they find value in sharing their progress with the group.
As we were forewarned by other fellowships, this tailored and flexible approach does have a flip side. Bespoke support requires us to be extremely hands-on and takes up a lot of staff capacity. Since we have a small team to begin with, this means that there is a limit to the number of fellows that we can support. At the moment, we have the capacity to support and connect between 4 to 8 fellows at a given time.
Having fellows joining and leaving at different points in time also requires us to be adaptive and flexible in our programme planning. We can only set our calendars and agenda for one to two quarters ahead. This is very much a pilot approach and we are yet to see if this flexibility is indeed impactful for the fellows and sustainable for our team. For this pilot cohort of fellows, we made it a point to be clear about this and ensure that the fellows were comfortable exploring this new approach with us. We are truly grateful for the patience and insights that they offered as we co-design their fellowship experience. As we recruited for and launched the fellowship, we learned that we had to build trust in both directions. We had to build our trust in the fellows and their commitment to positive change. But we also had to earn their trust so that we could build a safe and supportive community together.
Supporting a Person versus Supporting an Idea. Our hope is that this one-year fellowship can give a leader the time and space to reflect and explore the different possibilities of their new initiative and how this connects with the next phase of their personal journeys. We’ve found that this exploration requires an openness to uncertainty both for the fellows and for the Firetree team. We encourage fellows to use the first few months of their fellowship to explore new ideas rather than jump back to the methods and interventions that they are used to — to step out of their comfort zones. We hope to help surface assumptions that are being made and figure out effective ways to test these assumptions before designing a full-blown programme.
As fellows go through this exploration, their ideas and directions will evolve — sometimes in ways that we, as Firetree, did not expect. This is where it has been helpful to be clear and remind ourselves that the fellowship is supporting the fellows as individuals and we believe in their values-alignment and commitment to their communities.
Fellowship Requires Presence. Peer support and a strong sense of community are core elements of the Firetree Fellowship. We learned from the other fellowships that it is important to be explicit about this expectation when recruiting fellows. They are expected to be actively sharing with and contributing to their peer fellow community. Not all leaders need this type of support when they are starting their new initiatives. Some only need technical guidance or financial support. Understandably, not everyone has the time or capacity to be present for their peers and to support the other fellows when needed. We’ve found that the ability to be present and contribute to others is a key recruitment criteria for our fellowship.
Another key insight from other fellowships is the importance of facilitation — ensuring that we choose facilitators who are able to hold space respectfully and have shared experiences with the fellows. A key point raised by other fellowships and one that we are navigating is the issue of power dynamics. Although Firetree team members all have previous experience leading nonprofits and community organizations, at the end of the day, we are still a funder that is implementing and facilitating this fellowship. We must be conscious of how our presence and input can affect the fellowship space. We must also manage the fellows’ expectations about receiving funding for their initiatives after the fellowship period. We clearly state in our fellowship agreement that there should be no expectation of additional project funding, especially since we are engaging some fellows whose work is outside the areas and topics that Firetree Philanthropy funds.
Internal Reflection and Reviewing Your Process. Setting the criteria and designing the Firetree Fellowship programme required much introspection from our team. We had to lay out (and sometimes challenge) what our real objectives and priorities were for the fellowship. What would success and failure look like for us? What was our longer term vision for this work? In fact, some criteria were not apparent in our design process and only surfaced as we started to engage the fellows. Therefore, it is important to build in clear opportunities to reflect and refine our criteria, process, and fellow engagement plans.
Moving forward, we hope to share more lessons and insights as we engage the fellows and continue to refine the Firetree Fellowship experience.
