The Echoing Green Fellowship:
Building a Lifelong Fellow Community
Author: Andrea Davila
November 5, 2013
OVERVIEW
For twenty-five years Echoing Green has built an extraordinary network of social
entrepreneurs by selecting and supporting emerging talent for a two-year fellowship. We
have also come to believe that Echoing Green can play an important long-term role in
supporting these nearly six hundred entrepreneurs to achieve greater social impact, even
after their initial two-year term of active support is complete. This note outlines our
current strategy for supporting our Echoing Green Fellows throughout their lives.
Over the last three years, Echoing Green has iteratively piloted and developed our lifelong
leadership strategy. Through conversations with the Fellows and other key stakeholders
we identified a three-pronged approach that allows us to support high numbers of Fellows
with a variety of opportunities, but maintains focus on identifying and catalyzing those
with the highest potential for impact.
2013-2016 STRATEGY: CONNECT, ENGAGE, CATALYZE
Our current strategy consists of connecting, engaging and catalyzing overlapping
populations of Echoing Green Fellows to create greater social impact in the world.
This strategy allows us to balance various levels of interest from Fellows in engaging with
Echoing Green, while fully utilizing Echoing Green’s rich set of programming. With
nearly 600 Fellows in our community, it was critical to develop a strategy that judiciously
allocates Echoing Green’s limited resources toward increasing social impact in the most
leveraged way possible.
Echoing Green unleashes next generation talent to solve the world's biggest problems. Founded in 1987
by global growth equity firm General Atlantic, Echoing Green has invested over $31 million in seed funding
in more than 500 social entrepreneurs, the Echoing Green Fellows, and their innovative organizations
across the globe. Echoing Green Fellows include the founders of Teach For America, City Year, College
Summit, Citizen Schools, One Acre Fund, and SKS Microfinance.
Catalyze
Engage
Connect
Connect – ALL Fellows are in touch with Echoing Green
[2014 Goal: Echoing Green is connected to 90% of all Fellows selected since 1990]
Without clear access points to the members of our community, our ability to connect
individuals, understand trends, and make impact is limited. Therefore, we have gathered
working contact information contact for 90% of our Fellows, and are actively connected1
to over 60% of all of our Fellows. Comparative research shows this rate of connection is
above the rates of other highly engaged communities, such as MIT or McKinsey’s alumni
networks, which hovers between 60-70%.
Engage – M ANY Fellows are directly engaged in Echoing Green
program m ing
[2014 Goal: 35% of Fellows participate directly in our programs]
Echoing Green is one of a few safe spaces for social entrepreneurs to share challenges to
making big, bold impact. We want to continue to provide Fellows a variety of ways to gain
access to that safe space throughout their careers. We also hope that regular opportunities
to engage with the Echoing Green community strengthen Fellows’ ties to each other and
lay the foundation for greater engagement and impact over time. Examples of engagement
opportunities include:
• Attend Echoing Green conferences
• Serve as application evaluators to select upcoming Fellows
• Support current Fellows in an advisory or mentorship capacity.
Catalyze – SELECT Fellows are m ore deeply supported at key inflection
points
[2014 Goal: Launch 3 ‘Inflection Cohorts’ with 8-10 Fellows each]
Echoing Green has perfected the craft of supporting early-stage entrepreneurs over the
past 25 years. What if we could apply the same formula from our early-stage Fellowship
program to Fellows throughout the course of their careers? Our Inflection Cohort model is
1
Active connections are defined by, at minimum, email or other direct personal contact with a member of the
Echoing Green staff in the previous 12 months.
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an experiment designed to do exactly that: apply our original Fellowship support
philosophy to a group of later-stage Fellows at critical inflection points in their
professional lives. We hypothesize that by focusing on a few Fellows best poised for laterstage impact, we can leverage our core competencies and key learning to accelerate
progress toward their goals. Below we flesh out our philosophy for this approach further.
CATALYZE SPOTLIGHT: THE INFLECTION COHORT MODEL
Theory of Change: By supporting and guiding Fellows during a critical
m om ent, we can increase their ability to deliver social im pact.
Our inflection cohort model forms small groups of Fellows at key inflection points who
both support one other and tap in to a higher level of direct support from Echoing Green.
By 2014, we aim to launch three inflection cohorts, each comprising eight to twelve
Fellows. We have articulated the goals of the inflection cohorts as follows:
1.
2.
3.
4.
To connect Fellows to a community of practice
To provide traditional leadership development training
To provide specific skills training relevant to their most salient challenges
To offer inspiration and the opportunity to be reenergized by their work
Cohort topics and criteria are still to be determined, but all cohorts will:
• Participate in a series of three dedicated retreats,
• Have the opportunity to attend other Echoing Green-sponsored conferences,
• Have access to one-on-one strategic support as needed from Echoing Green staff
through the Individual Fellow Plan framework.
We will be utilizing the “Individual Fellow Plan” philosophy to ground our work and align
it with the lessons from the core Fellowship Program2.
ON MEASUREMENT
In an effort to rigorously test our assumptions as we build this experimental model, we
have identified key metrics for each of the three pillars of our strategy, as well as aligned
programming toward these goals. Metrics for “Connect” and “Engage” are listed above.
For our Inflection Cohort strategy, we developed a more robust set of metrics and aim to
revisit our programming after 2016 to assess its efficacy.
Inflection cohort members are measured pre-and post-cohort to determine:
• Increased alignment with a community of practice
• Increased confidence in their leadership development skills
2
For more information, read The Echoing Green Fellowship: Our Philosophy of Fellow Support
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•
Increased engagement with the mission of their work.
Inflection cohort members are also measured on their progress through the skill-based
“Building Blocks” determined by the cohort. Unlike the early-stage Fellowship experience,
Echoing Green does not claim to have a point of view on key criteria for success in laterstage inflection points. Thus, early work of the inflection cohorts is determining salient
challenges and “Building Blocks” common to the cohort participants and unique to that
cohort.
As per our broader Fellow support philosophy, we will also have specific numerical
ratings per member for each of these cohort-determined “Building Blocks”.
FOR FURTHER READING
This note is the third of a series. We also recommend:
• The Echoing Green Fellowship: How we identify promising leaders and
organizations
• The Echoing Green Fellowship: Our Philosophy of Fellow Support
Other useful articles include:
• The Meaning of Social Entrepreneurship, Greg Dees
• Not Everyone Should Be A Social Entrepreneur, Lara Galinsky
• Lesser, E. L., and J. Storck. "Communities of Practice and Organizational
Performance." IBM Systems Journal 40.4 (2001): 831-41.
• Wenger, Etienne, and William Snyder. Communities of Practice: The
Organizational Frontier. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Business Review, 2000.
Finally, Echoing Green has learned tremendously from others in the field, and hopes to
continue to do so. Learn more about some of our allies in this field:
• The Draper Richards Kaplan Foundation
• Ashoka
• The Unreasonable Institute
• Village Capital
We are eager to hear from you. To order reprints of this note or to share feedback, please
contact [email protected].
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