Want to advance your career? Feeling isolated and
burned out? A fellowship can change your life.
by Darcy Lockman for Who Cares Magazine
During one nine-month period, Amy Field worked in the media, on a political
campaign, in the government, and with a labor union, a business, and a
nonprofit. No, she's not the biggest flake you've ever heard of: She's a
former Coro fellow.
The Coro Fellows Program is a full-time graduate-level
program that matches its fellows with leaders of public affairs
organizations for six short internships. One of the oldest and most
prestigious fellowships, it strives to produce effective community leaders.
The Coro fellowship is just one of many programs that allow
nonprofit types to check out different areas of public affairs, as well as
trade ideas with fellow do-gooders, take classes in relevant fields or just
take a much-needed breather.
Fellowships can remove you from your
day-to-day life and remind you what spawned your interest in nonprofit work
in the first place, offering new ideas and fresh plans to implement in your
own organization.
Field, who currently recruits fellows for Coro, chose to pursue a
fellowship after college because she wasn't sure where she wanted to go in
the nonprofit sector.
"I was introduced to an entirely new set of options,"
she says. "I didn't know how to find out what I was good at. Through the
fellowship, I did a different internship every month. It was an exploration
and discovery of what's out there in public affairs. As someone who wants
to make a difference, I was allowed to figure out what ways there are to do
that."
A fellowship can give you the necessary experience to make a
difference effectively. "It's difficult to find a public interest job,"
explains Gia Lee, a Georgetown University Women's Law and Public Policy
fellow, "especially doing litigation, straight out of law school. Public
interest organizations don't have the time or resources to train new
lawyers, and litigation takes a lot of training so they want people with
experience. It's a valuable proposition for the recent grad because the
organization invests a great deal in you in terms of training. It works out
well for them, too, because they don't have to pay for your services-your
fellowship does that."
Not, it should be added, very well. Where Lee's classmates
graduated into corporate firms whose salaries begin just under six figures,
public interest law fellows typically earn in the mid-30s. Like other
fellows, of course, Lee is not in this for the money. She has always been
interested in women's and civil rights. This year-long fellowship will give
her the opportunity to become something of an expert on both.
Lee's anxious about still having to find a public interest job at
the end of year. She shouldn't be. When Field's fellowship finished, she
received four job offers without lifting a resum�-demonstrating that the
primary benefit of a fellowship is the contacts that you make.
Current
fellows and alums throughout the nonprofit sector claim that out of all the
fellowship perks-seminars, retreats, professional training, cash, etc.-the
contacts that they make have the most lasting impact on their work.
Kellogg National Leadership Program fellow Tony Defeill explains:
"I founded a nonprofit a few years ago with a lot of involvement from
others, but I was the one that stuck around for the long haul. I felt like
I was out there on my own. I didn't have mentors or a fellowship of peers
to nurture and support what I do. Now I have that. Through my interactions
with these people, I'm challenged to think differently. I learn to work
with people in a way that can affect change in a different manner than I
was familiar with before."
"The notion of a peer support group is significant," notes Henry
Izumizaki, executive director of San Francisco Bay Area Eureka Communities,
an organization that brings together the executive directors of
community-based organizations to improve their leadership skills.
"Nonprofit folks tend to be competitive instead of supportive because
they're going after the same funding sources, looking for the right staffs.
They need to build trusting relationships to overcome this because they can
learn so much from each other. A fellowship offers an avenue for doing
this."
"If I'm having trouble with a certain situation," says Saundra
Bryant, Eureka fellow and executive director of All People's Christian
Center, "I can call one of my Eureka fellows and ask how they've handled
it. A couple of us are even joining forces to work on a collaborative
project."
Through the people that fellows meet as well as the experiences
that they have, fellowships also offer a singular opportunity for
growth-both professionally and personally.
Many programs, such as the
Kellogg Foundation, fund their fellows' interests in subjects that are only
tangential to their areas of concentration. They'll pay for you to take
guitar lessons, for example, or yoga classes if you believe that it will
somehow enhance your personal or professional life.
Says Defeill, "All of
it makes you better at the work you do, and if the work you do is improving
the world than fellowships improve the world." However, fellowships may not
improve your marriage: Defeill reports that married fellows often complain
of outgrowing their mates.
Fellowships are undergoing some changes themselves. Programs like
Kellogg and Eureka have started to wonder whether their fellows are
contributing to the goals that the fellowships exist to advance. "Even
after years of lots of money going in," explains Izumizaki, "there was no
overt or clear outcome required. So none was evaluated. People are looking
at that and wondering, hmm, what happened here?" Kellogg has hired someone
to find out.
Although future fellows may find more pressure to produce solid
results, they'll also find a more activist-friendly funding environment.
Douglas Maguire, the director of the Fund for Social Entrepreneurs, says
that "there's a move toward increased flexibility on the part of funders to
meet the real time needs of tomorrow's community leaders, rather than have
the community leaders jump through a series of hoops to meet the cycles of
foundations. We're moving towards a more customer-driven system."
Fellowship programs are figuring out other ways to help their
fellows better. They recognize that the greatest benefit that they can
provide is professional contacts. Following the example of fellowships from
other professions like law and medicine, many nonprofit fellowship programs
are working to put together tight alumni networks by hiring people to
assemble rosters and make former fellows accessible to one another.
They're
looking at professional programs like the Georgetown University Women's Law
and Public Policy Fellowship, which introduces its lawyer fellows to top
civil-rights attorneys and makes sure that they attend prestigious legal
events-like a moot court at the Supreme Court or a dinner to celebrate the
anniversary of Roe v. Wade-for ways to open similar doors for their
fellows. "Many of the programs have been around," says Maguire. "There's
now a base of people who've been through these programs and we want to tap
the asset that's been created."
In the end, though, it's not who you know but who you are. Although
all of the people interviewed for this story would choose to do their
fellowships again if given the chance, "there's no one-to-one relationship
between success of a fellowship and success of a person," says Izumizaki.
"A fellowship is a tool, and the people who know how to use the tool kit
will be the most successful."
�Anastasia M. Warpinski provided research assistance for this article.
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