🗺️FELLOWSHIP PLAYBOOK
Welcome, dear Impact Fellows! This playbook will help you navigate our time together & give you access to all relevant links. Reach out to neiiifellowship@gmail.com if you have any questions.
The Fellowship Journey: Important Dates & Elements of the Fellowship
The Impact Fellowship equips each cohort of 40-50 practitioners with the skills & knowledge to enter the world of impact investing & sustainable finance. Our learning journey will introduce you to the sector’s themes, approaches, & players through curated educational sessions, workshops, & small-group discussions. You will gain insights into the financial system, explore your relationship to money, as well as, find several entrance points into the world of impact investing.
We see the Fellowship as a guided, peer-based, immersion, over 4 months with loads of live sessions, and access to many different resources and tools. We’ll co-create the program together based on your interests. There will be opportunities for knowledge & skill sessions, self-directed study, networking, and opportunities to connect to the impact industry. We have many partners involved to show you how they approach sustainability, and we’re putting a lot of work into making this Fellowship a success.
Different elements will form the Fellowship:
Fellows learn with us through active participation in educational sessions, workshops, & small-group discussions. We will create Community Calls, Skills Sessions, and further learning opportunities like on-demand resources or partner opportunities. You’ll be invited to help create these so your involvement is important to get the most out of the program. Please put the time into helping co-create the kind of content you’d like to see and learn about. There is so much you could dive into in this space and we all have different focus points. A mentor once told me, learning about sustainable finance and impact investing is like drinking from a firehose so get ready to swim. We’ll swim together!
There will be interactive webinars on all Thursdays in September & October that will take you on a journey through the world of impact investing & sustainable finance. This will be an opportunity for you to get in touch with your peers, make sense of your learnings and meet some of our core partnering organizations. The weekly sessions will be hosted by NEIII or one of our partners.
Dates: Thursdays 6 pm UTC+2 (CEST) throughout September & October
Purpose: These calls are for you to think deeply and to closely connect together. It’ll be a space for exchange and disucssion. Together we’ll explore how we create impact, the role of money & investing, and systems change. We’re excited to host you as we think of impact investing at different levels from the systemic, to organizational, to personal.
Throughout the Fellowship (Sep-Dec), we will offer additional weekly live sessions from partners and supporters in the impact investing field. The number of these skill sessions will depend on your interests & agency.
Dates: flexible, upon agreement with our partners, September to December
More Info: We’ve targeted our skills sessions to address the issues we see important in developing your skills as impact investors. These are based on the interests you expressed during your onboarding and we’re happy to tackle the questions our current cohort is trying to answer. These calls are yours to create and influence and depending on your availabilty and energy you can get involved in making the program something really helpful to you.
We curated an extensive list of on-demand resources like articles, past workshops, podcasts, or on-demand programs, following the topics we are exploring throughout our time together. Rest assured that there will be opportunities to dive deeper into everything we address in the interactive sessions. There will be some recommended resources which will help you to follow through, and additional resources in case you want to truly focus on something. We’ll give you more as we progress through each module.
Find the resources in the module overviews, see links below
Timing: As much or as little as you want to go deeper with.
Purpose: With the wealth of info our there and on the complex global issues we all face, we’ve compiled some that we really like to help. Please send us any resources, reports, speakers, videos, etc. that might be of interest to others and we’ll include them for future cohorts.
After 2 months of guided learning in Sep & Oct, we invite you to dive deeper into the field in what we refer to as ‘Peer Action November’. In short, you will have 4 weeks to organize in groups of 3-5 people, either realizing an impact-related project of your choice or embarking on a peer learning deep-dive, zooming in on a particular learning tool or topic within the field. We’d like to hear about your own impact projects and what topics you want to go deeper with. You'll receive further information as we move ahead in the program.
Dates: November, self-paced, by yourself or in a group
More Info: Take this time to focus on go deeper into the topic of your choice. You could spend the month studying a specific topic from one of our education partners, or self direct by reading about, meeting practitioners, and participating with specific areas of focus, or maybe present your own ideas to our advisors and impact investors. These are just some idaes and the realm of possibilities is open.
In December, we will offer you the opportunity to step into practice by pitching your projects & learnings from November & further get in touch with people & organizations working in the field at our career day. These plus our Send Off will be spaces for you to network together with your co-Fellows, our advisors, our board members, and our partners. We’ll invite a group together from our community of people willing and able to help in your career paths.
Dates: TBD - 1st and 2nd week of December
More Info: We want to have plenty of time at the end of our learning journey to integrate, digest, and move forward with our learnings from the Fellowship. Join us as we make spaces available for you to share, speak up and get feedback from those in our community.
Staying Up to Date & In the Loop
Fellowship Events Overview To find the registration links, recordings, and event list of all upcoming events check out the Fall events overview ! We’ll keep this updated and it’ll be the place you can always go back to for what has happened or what is coming up.
Fellowship Google Calendar To stay up to date with all possible Fellowship events, we invite you to add our public calendar to your calendar. It will always have the events we have signed up for and that you can access from either ourselves, our partners, or other opportunities. We will additionally invite you to all obligatory sessions using the email you used in the registration process. Here's an overview of all our timezones in case you're getting confused
Fellowship Google Drive Another way of staying in the loop is through our Google Drive. Here you can find all documents that are linked in this playbook, and further helpful material about the fellowship.
The module overviews will be another helpful place to tag along & find what you need, incl. all resources. (see right below!)
Module Overview & Resources
Our module overviews include long lists of resources that accompany you throughout the different modules. This might well overwhelm you in the first place - and we decided to share it with you, anyways & invite you to take what you need, in bite-sized bits. It was important for us to keep as many of these resources as possible free of charge. An alternative way of getting access to the books we include in our list would, for example, be to order them at your public library.
Modules will be released just before the start of each module.
Module 1: Money, finance & the economy - why we need to changeModule 2: A case for impact, your role in the change & emerging alternativesModule 3: Rooting your impact on a Personal & Community levelModule 4: Peer Action NovemberPartnerships & further Opportunities
Still hungry for more connections & learning opportunities? Check out our extensive list of partners in the field, find life events & on-demand deep dives available to you. NEIII has been building a great network of partners in the field and many of them have particular offers that might be interesting for you (some of them even with a reduced fee).
The Fellowship gives access to additional benefits:
Access to educational sessions, workshops, & small-group discussions
Get accepted into private networking communities we know of
Find career development & learning support
Support from us to join partner programs and other challenges and conferences on the topic
Mentorship opportunities & Leadership development
COHORT '24 - Meet the fellows!
Get to know your cohort & find all the ways to stay connected here.
💚COHORT '24 - Meet the fellowsFAQ
All your questions answered! Share them with us as we move through the fellowship.
⁉️FAQ - Answers to your questionsYour commitments & responsibilities or: how to get a certificate
The Fellowship has been building up a high reputation in the field and might well open some doors for you in the future. In order to further build this reputation, we expect a certain level of commitment from you concerning both how you participate and what you participate in. In general, communication is our most important value, so just reach out if you can’t commit to some of the following, and we will find a solution together.
Fellowship agreement:
Actively participate in the Fellowship program
Show up to online workshops and engage with presenters and participants
Commit 8–10 hours per month, especially in Sep and Oct, during our live weekly community calls on Thursdays and view the recordings when unavailable.
Have stable internet access, call in from a quiet place, and join with video whenever possible
Have an intermediate level of English, as all sessions will be in this language.
Bring your curiosity and desire to learn & engage with the content
Complete the onboarding survey, a mid-point review survey, and a closing survey.
How we interact
Intentional listening & sharing: listen closely, be conscious of time
Chatham House Rule: share your learnings, but not the names
Respect for others’ opinions and their boundaries
Lean in to learn - actively participate
Take care of yourself & each other - host yourselves
What we expect from you
Participate in a minimum of 6 of 8 interactive sessions in Sep & Oct. Please contact us if that is going to be a problem for your schedule or if anything changes.
Join a group for the Peer Action November & present your learnings
Have a look into the recommended resources
Fill in our mid-term & closing feedback form
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