Call for Application: Tiny Fellowship Program (US)

About

The Tiny Fellowship takes you from an idea to an initial proof point that is ready to grow. You’ll learn how to plan, run, and evaluate a pilot. As a Tiny Fellow, you’ll receive coaching, learning and evaluation support from experts, a $5,500 grant, and a community of peers, all pushing themselves to run disciplined tests of their ideas with their communities.

The Tiny Fellowship is designed for people who have an education-focused idea who are ready to figure out what that idea would look like in practice and ready to get feedback from their community by building an initial proof of concept.

Tiny Fellows vary as to whether they have a formal organization, program, or funding for their idea. The program is designed to support Fellows with varying capacity levels, and often includes a mix of Fellows working full-time, part-time, with parenting responsibilities, and/or other commitments, though this program will require a larger time commitment than Essentials. Tiny applicants may be Essentials alumni, but do not have to be.

Program Offerings

Through the program, Tiny Fellows will learn how to plan, run, and evaluate a pilot of your idea. By the end of the fellowship, you’ll have evidence on whether your community wants your idea and if it works.

• Over $25,000 is invested into each Tiny venture, including:
  • Up to $5,500 in stipends for Fellows who complete all Fellowship deliverables
  • Nearly $20,000 in individualized coaching, community, curriculum, and metric & evaluation support

Fellows will self-identify what areas they need support in, engage in dialogues about the role of equity in their work, attend virtual events to build a strong sense of community, and gain skills and best practices for project development and impact evaluation. By the end of the Tiny Fellowship, they’ll have evidence to determine the demand and efficacy of their idea.

What you get?

They believe in a human-centered process that helps you grow your idea in community and ensures that what you build is truly impactful. Each of their fellowships is intentionally designed to provide:

• Coaching from alumni experts on how to develop your leadership in a self-aware and values-centered way
• Community of peers across the nation also creating a more equitable future of education
• Curriculum that teaches you how to test and grow your idea from a place of curiosity and reflectiveness
• Capital invested directly in you through grants to run small-scale experiences of your idea in your community

Who is Eligible for the 4.0 Fellowships?

• Anyone with an idea to reimagine education in the United States. So, you. And by education, they mean that your idea is in service of learning — defined broadly — and designed to benefit children (from birth to young adult), families, and/or educators. It can be a school (private, public, charter, homeschool, any kind), program, service, tech tool, physical product, or anything else that fulfills that mission. They also know that ideas evolve a lot, especially in their earliest stages, so they allow for flexibility. Things can change, and you don’t need to decide if you want to incorporate as a nonprofit or for-profit before you apply, for instance — those decisions come later.
• They work with really early-stage founders, so if you’ve brought in significant revenue or funding with your idea, they may not be best positioned to support you.

For more information, visit 4.0.

Deadline: 15 October 2023