🗺️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 [e-mail] 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 with money, and 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 connecting to the impact industry. We have many partners involved to show you how they approach sustainable finance, and we’re putting a lot of work into making this Fellowship a success.

Our invitations - Your learning opportunities Knowing: Get access to the latest practices to understand a truly sustainable financial system.

Relating: Explore your personal & societal use of money & investing to challenge the status quo.

Connecting: Expand your network by getting to know impact-oriented experts & Fellows.

Practicing: Learn from global impact projects or pitch your own idea to program partners.

Learning: Join our corporate partners for tailored learning journeys & workshops.

Different elements will form the Fellowship:

You are invited to participate in and learn with us through active participation in educational sessions, workshops, & small-group discussions. You'll participate in a diverse set of opportunities available for you join: - Community Calls - Skills Sessions - On-Demand Resources - Partner Opportunities

Please put the time into helping co-create the kind of content you’d like to see and learn about. Meaning you help craft the flow, invite topics, and organize to engage with each other.

There is so much you could dive into in this space, and we all have different focus points. Your involvement is important to get the most out of the program. Learning about sustainable finance and impact investing is like navigating a whole ocean - and we will try to learn how to swim together!

Check Out EACH of our Modes of Participating

Interactive Webinars: Community Calls

There will be interactive Community Calls on all Wednesdays, February to March, that will take you on a journey through the world of impact investing & sustainable finance. These will continue to the end of the program if you have the time and space to join.

Community calls are 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 sessions will alternate bi-weekly between sessions hosted by NEIII or one of our partners and the ones you host for networking and discussion.

Dates: Wednesdays at noon ET / 6 pm UTC+1 (CET) throughout Feb & Mar.

Purpose: These calls are for you to think deeply and to closely connect together. It’ll be a space for exchange and discussion. 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.

Skill sessions: Pulse of the Industry

Throughout the Fellowship (Feb-May), we will offer additional Weekly Skill 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, Feb to May

More Info: We’ve targeted our Skills Sessions to address the issues we see as essential 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 availability and energy, you can get involved in making the program something really helpful to you.

On-demand Resources

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 that will help you to follow along 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 weekly overviews and the resources section (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.

Peer Action April

After 2 months of guided learning in Feb & Mar, we invite you to dive deeper into the field in what we call ‘Peer Action April’. 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: April, self-paced, by yourself or in a group

More Info: Take this time to focus on going 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 particular focus areas, or maybe present your ideas to our advisors and impact investors. These are just some ideas, and the realm of possibilities is open. We will share examples from past programs in upcoming announcements.

Practice Spaces

In May, we will offer you the opportunity to step into practice by pitching your projects & learnings from April & further get in touch with people & organizations working in the field through our career resources. 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 from our community of people who are willing and able to help you in your career paths.

Dates: TBD - 1st and 2nd week of May

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 Google Group - be sure to join to receive all emails and up-to-date calendar invites

• Fellowship Google Calendar

  • View our Program Calendar

  • Add Calendar to Your Own

  To stay updated on 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 Events Overview To find the registration links, recordings, and event list of all upcoming events, check out the full list of Spring events! We’ll keep this updated, and it’ll be the place you can always go back to to see what has happened or what is coming up.

• Fellowship Google Drive Another way of staying in the loop is through our Google Drive. Here, you can find all documents linked to this playbook and further helpful material about the fellowship. Please reach out if you are missing anything or don't have access to something.

• Weekly Overviews Each week's page will have a summary of any upcoming activities. This will be a helpful place to tag along & find what you need, including all websites or documents you need to review. Do go through it and choose what items you want to learn from and review.

• WhatsApp Group Please join our group for chatting, sharing resources, and always staying reminded of any upcoming events or opportunities. You need to join our Announcements group, also.

Fellowship Flow Overview

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🗓 Weekly Overviews & Resources

Our weekly overviews include long lists of resources accompanying you throughout the Fellowship. This might well overwhelm you in the first place - and we decided to share it with you, anyway. 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 could be ordering them at your public library.

Weekly overviews will be released just before the start of each week.

• Week 1 - Getting Started

• Week 2 - Kick-Off: Why Are We Here

• Week 3 - Developing Your Skills

• Week 4 - Impact Investing Knowledge Base

• Week 5 - Deal-Making and Impact Products

• Week 6 - Systems Thinking and Money

• Week 7 - Public & Private Partnerships

• Week 8 - Mapping Emerging Alternatives

• Week 9 - Community Development

• Week 10 - Personal Impact

• Week 11 - XX

• Week 12 - Putting it into Practice

• Week 13 -

• Week 14 - Sharing Learnings

• Week 15 -

• Week 16 - Send Off: Next Up

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📚Resources

In this part of the playbook, you will find all of our available resources organized based on the theme they are exploring within impact investing. For example, impact investing basics to specific things like deal-making or career advice. Check out these pages for past recordings, articles, papers, podcasts, newsletters & many other things.

🧰Resources🗞️Sites and Newsletters

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👫 Partnerships & further Opportunities

Still hungry for more connections & learning opportunities? Check out our extensive list of partners, and find live 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 live 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

🫰Tailored Resources & Opportunities🎖️Partners and Supporting Networks

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💚COHORT SPRING '25 - Meet the fellows!

Get to know your cohort & find all the ways to stay connected here.

💟COHORT SPRING '25 - Meet the fellows

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⁉️ FAQ

All your questions are answered! Share new questions with us as we move through the fellowship so we can keep growing our list.

⁉️FAQ - Answers to your questions

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🗺️ Let's Begin

Your 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. To further build this reputation, we expect a certain level of commitment from you concerning how 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 Feb & Mar. 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 April & present your learnings

• Have a look at the recommended resources

• Fill in our mid-term & closing feedback form

Safe Space

We want to create an inclusive and safe learning environment. This means treating everyone with the utmost respect while in these sessions. You will come across a diversity of opinions, as well as, people, and we will not stand for any disrespectful behavior. Please ensure you act professionally at all times and give others the opportunity to express themselves, to connect and to learn. We are putting our trust in you to act responsibly, to show up genuinely and truthfully, and to contribute.

Co-Creation

The fellowship should be something you help to co-create. This means that you take the initiative to help organize workshops, topics, and resources that you think will be helpful to your peers and yourself. As an example, if there are speakers you want to hear or topics you want to discuss, you can let me know, and we will work hard to make that happen. I will soon be sending you some resources to further gauge your interests and to set up workshops specific to the topics you shared in your applications. Also, if there is a skill or some knowledge you have that you'd like to share with your cohort, you can self-organize and make this possible. This is your program to help create and develop.

Timing

We are a global program, so please respect each other's time just as much as we respect your availability. Wherever possible, we'll include multiple times for events and try to cater to as many people as possible. Preference will be given to our speakers who are giving their free time to share with you. Recordings of events will be made available wherever possible. For ease of organizing, time zones will be typically given relative to the USA's Eastern Time Zone (EST) and also to Europe's Central Time Zone (CET). If you have any questions about an event, feel free to reach out, and we'll work to make the materials available to you. From time to time, you may need to get up early or stay up late to join. This is the opportunity to be in a global program, and accommodating this means others in the program can join, so please be available where you can and for what you are interested in.