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.
- 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.
- 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.
You do not need to be based in the United States or be an American citizen. Echoing Green encourages 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.
An organization does not only have to be run by one individual, but only a single applicant is eligible to apply for an Echoing Green fellowship starting in 2021.
Echoing Green does not have any educational requirements to apply for a Fellowship.
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. 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.
- 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.
- 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.
Organizations are not required to be structured as a nonprofit in order to be eligible. All organization structures are eligible for an Echoing Green Fellowship as long as they are focused on social impact.
Organizations still in the idea phase are eligible. You do not need to establish 501(c)(3) status or register your organization before you apply.
