Apply to Be a Fellow
About the Empowerment & Impact Fellowship
The Empowerment & Impact Fellowship (EIF) is a prestigious program at Harvard that focuses on developing the skills of its competitively selected participants to exercise leadership in the field of social change. For the past seven years, Fellows have successfully developed the skills, approaches, and theories of action that are needed to solve complex problems in systems facing stagnation, regression, or conflict. The Fellowship involves an intensive leadership practicum course in the Fall, case consultations on real-time challenges unfolding at our high-impact partner organizations, and a financial award of $4,000 with access to additional funding and training opportunities.
Fellows work together and with faculty and staff to expand their own capacity for fostering structural transformation; facilitate dialogue across differences; and create new knowledge for the field of change leadership, and in the interests of a more equitable and humane society. Many alumni of the Fellowship have gone on to lead high-impact work in universities, schools, districts, non-profits, and consultancies, or through their own ventures.
Major Components of the Program Include:
- A half-day program orientation and cohort retreat in late August.
- A four-credit, fall-semester course that meets twice a week.
- Site-based consultations on critical problems of practice with and for EIF's high-impact partner organizations.
- Priority access to some Harvard courses with aligned themes and aims.
- Semi-monthly cohort meetings in the spring semester.
- Access to relevant conferences and other professional development activities.
- Opportunities to facilitate interventions in departments, offices, and schools across campus.
- Opportunities to organize major gatherings for the cohort (eg retreats) or the community (eg conferences).
- Opportunities to author and publish scholarly articles arising from one’s EIF work.
- A piece of summative writing that centers on observations from and recommendations for one’s site-based consultations and may be used as a professional artifact, in the form of an exit memo or strategic plan.
All Fellows will receive a $4,000 Fellowship award and a certificate upon completion of the program, and will have ongoing access to the EIF network and resources.
Frequently Asked Questions
There are no requirements for formal experience in any given field. Some of the most effective Fellows in the past have come from very different fields, but they have always tried to exercise leadership toward social justice goals. Most applicants with prior experience in our fields of interest are drawn to the program because their expertise has come to feel not wholly sufficient. Applicants with experience should be prepared both to leverage their background and, at times, to step outside of it and experiment with disciplines and practices that may not have previously informed their work.
No. Certain kinds of experience help, others are best “unlearned” or at least reconsidered, in the sense that facilitation as you know it may or may not include the orientations toward reading oneself and reading a group that this program tries to impart. We hope to instill new kinds of watchfulness, and equip it with a fuller set of moves. Also, having a diverse and inclusive cohort means that no one benefits from everyone having the same skills or background. This is to say that facilitators and non-facilitators alike are welcome.
The course component emphasizes inside-out and outside-in approaches to leadership development, and revolves around deep dives into social change case studies. Fellows work to understand both external and internal dynamics that impact this work. The uniqueness of the approach is in moving away from emphases on guilt, blame, conflict avoidance, and self-policing toward galvanizing people to face the difficult challenges that systems produce as people try to achieve more just outcomes. We use the lenses of Adaptive Leadership, Immunity to Change, Emergent Strategy, Critical Theory and Pedagogy, and Adult Development, among others. The course is hands-on and centered on the needs and experiences of Fellows.
Fellows will learn to deploy specific frameworks with some ease (including Adaptive Leadership, Critical Pedagogy and Immunity to Change) in settings where social justice interventions are both necessary and resisted, whether consciously or unconsciously. However, the Fellowship draws a distinction between skills and dispositions insofar as both are vital to the work. We have observed that effective interventions call for attitudinal shifts that enable one to hold steady in challenging environments and spontaneously muster creative responses to a situation as it unfolds. Skills come in handy but aren’t enough by themselves to help one navigate difficult encounters. We pay just as much attention to the development of the self as an instrument for change that does not flinch or fall apart under chaos.
Our high-impact partners in Boston and Cambridge engage Fellows as short-term consultants, which could include one-time case analyses or multiple visits that delve more deeply into developing and sustaining concrete interventions, depending on the partner and the challenge(s) they happen to be facing. Every Fellow will be expected to take the lead on at least one consultation, which entails working with the partner to scope the purpose and direction of the collaboration, and following through on a project that could include as few as one and as many as three or four individual client touch points.
Over the course of the year there is a palpable shift toward self-organization of the Fellowship experience. As the months progress Fellows will be asked to take on more responsibilities in the creation of their own learning. This means that, on a voluntary basis, Fellows will be invited to plan and implement experiences for one another. Also, to the extent that Fellows are entrusted with a cohort budget for food, speakers, and other expenses, they will be accountable for minor administrative tasks required to access those funds, including short proposals for larger expenditures and light paperwork entailed in requisitioning payment to vendors.