Through our Henry Arnhold Fellowship we find leaders with promising conservation and climate solutions and help them to design and deliver them at scale.

We’re impact and scale-obsessed. Each year we select 8-10 leaders and help them (1) design high-impact scalable solutions and strategies for better, faster, bigger outcomes; (2) build the organizations to deliver them at scale; and (3) become part of a growing community of innovators in conservation and climate. Take a look at our past fellows here.

The one-year fellowship is bookended with a design retreat, comes with $100K in funding, and ongoing support from our team and network.

Here are the components of the fellowship in more detail:

Design and Strategy

‍The fellowship is bookended by an intensive week-long workshop to dive in on design for impact and strategy for scale. It’s a rare opportunity to focus completely on new ideas and a systematic way to apply them.

Community and Connections

We bring together a cohort of leaders with big poverty and climate solutions, alongside some great advisors and our team. Fellows join a growing community of fellows at the forefront of climate and conservation work.

Resources and Support

The fellowship comes with an unrestricted $100K grant up front. We coach all our fellows over the year on our design and strategy frameworks. All fellows are considered for longer-term Mulago funding.

We look for innovative leaders with a conservation or climate solution that works and has potential to go big. We look for impact-obsessed people pioneering effective ways to:

• protect nature and ecosystems (forests, rivers, oceans, mountains, grasslands)
• slow down climate change (drop emissions, use energy efficiently, capture carbon) or adapt to the new climate reality.

Their solutions focus on everything from tropical forests in the Amazon Basin to grasslands in Africa to fisheries in the Indian Ocean.

Henry Arnhold Fellows have:

• A widely-applicable solution (could be replicated and paid for at big scale) to a big conservation or climate problem
• An open mind and big ambition!
• An organization up and running — nonprofit or for-profit — even if very small or very early.
• A leadership role (usually an ED or CEO) at the organization, perhaps even a program within a big NGO.

Our Approach to Design

All our fellows have great ideas.  And want to create big change for the better.  Our design tools take them all the way from a great idea to impact at scale.  Scale for us doesn’t simply mean growth, nor is it just a big number.  And it isn’t about an organization “scaling;” it’s about scaling the impact you want to see in the world.  

We’ve found that for an organization to get to “scale” and make a big dent in a big problem it has to go through some stages 1) smart R&D to arrive at a scalable model, 2) replication by your own organization to prove scalability, and finally 3) scale via replication by others that creates the exponential growth of impact. The first part of the fellowship focuses on how to turn an idea into a systematic and replicable model. It takes them through a series of steps to get to a detailed impact model, and then serves as the vehicle of an ongoing process of iterative redesign. And then we dig into how to shepherd it through the stages to scale.  It’s a systematic approach to go all the way. You can take a look at some of the design content here.

The Retreat

The main event is a week-long retreat where fellows have the opportunity to think deeply about their path to create meaningful impact at scale. We bring together founders, experts, experienced doers, and our team. It's fast-paced, interactive, and fun.

The engagement also helps Fellows work through the organizational and financial models – how to deliver the impact model and how to pay for it. Fellows work directly with our team to incorporate new information, lessons, and ideas into their model.

Fellows get to listen, learn and support each other through:

• Design & scale sessions that build on pre-work
• Iteration on design for impact and strategy for scale
• Honed communications
• Small group topical conversations
• A series of curated one-on-one conversations
  

They emerge with more clarity on the dream and a roadmap to help get them there.