Regional Resilience Fellowship

The Regional Resilience Fellowship is a year-long program supporting community-rooted organizations and networks advancing resilience in food systems, ecological restoration, community wellness, and the built environment. Fellows gain access to shared tools and a global peer network while helping shape a digital commons of place-based solutions that can be adapted and scaled worldwide.

Local communities are at the forefront of addressing our most urgent global challenges. Open Future Coalition’s Regional Resilience Fellowship supports these organizations and networks not only by strengthening their work, but also by amplifying their leadership and ensuring their voices guide the systems that enable collective action.

Each Fellow receives an individualized work plan, technical assistance, and access to the Open Impact platform, including tools for project management and program delivery, impact measurement, resource publishing, and storytelling. Alongside this support, Fellows co-develop practical tools, publish resources, and share replicable practices, culminating in a Living Library of solutions adaptable across regions. Through cohort learning sessions and convenings, Fellows exchange strategies with peers, refine their storytelling, and surface insights that shape shared infrastructure and expand pathways for collaboration. (See more of what we learned from our first cohort.)

This year, 10 new Fellows from diverse regions and sectors will join the program, adding to a growing ecosystem of locally rooted, globally relevant solutions. Together, we are working toward a global dashboard of community solutions—a commons where data, stories, and adoptable models make locally-sourced impact visible and actionable at scale, and where communities have both the agency and resources they need to shape their futures on their own terms.

Applications for the 2025 Cohort are Now Open!

We invite organizations and networks leading locally driven resilience efforts to apply. The second cohort will include 10 Fellows representing diverse geographies, sectors, and organizational models. Each will contribute to a peer learning cohort and receive tailored support to strengthen their impact—while co-developing tools, resources, and strategies that advance community resilience worldwide.

Ecological
Restoration

Food
Systems

Community
Wellness

Built
Environment

Why Join?

As a Fellow, you’ll gain more than just tools—you’ll join a collaborative ecosystem designed to help your work thrive.

Grow Your Impact: Receive dedicated technical assistance, training, and access to the Open Impact platform to strengthen your project management, measurement, and coordination.

Learn & Collaborate: Participate in peer learning sessions, exchange best practices, co-develop tools with other regional practitioners, and contribute to a growing ecosystem of regenerative knowledge.

Tell Your Story: Refine how you share your impact through storytelling templates, impact dashboards, community engagement tools, and civic engagement campaigns.

Shape the Field: Help build a library of replicable, locally rooted solutions and resources that can inform other efforts around the world.

Who should apply?

We welcome applications from:

  • Networks or coalitions of local actors in a region or sector

  • Place-based hubs or service providers supporting multiple projects

  • Distributed organizations working with community-led initiatives

  • Regional anchors advancing shared infrastructure, knowledge, or resources 

Fellows are expected to:

  • Be actively coordinating or implementing multiple projects or sites

  • Have team capacity to engage in the Fellowship and trainings

  • Demonstrate a readiness to document, scale, or replicate their practices

  • Have an interest in shared resources, peer learning, and storytelling

  • Be open to co-developing tools and contributing content to a shared platform

  • Be actively measuring impact or building a portfolio of impact efforts

  • Prospective fellows should meet 90% of the following:

    Organizational Readiness

    • Operating or coordinating multiple active projects or sites

    • Bloom-stage (ready to grow and enhance) or Reseed-stage (ready to document and share)

    • Legal entity (or fiscal sponsorship) and basic operational infrastructure in place 

    • Organizational capacity to dedicate a team member’s time to steward a workplan and participate in Fellowship-related activities

    Coordination & Program Delivery

    • Has staff or capacity for community coordination and project management

    • Engaged in processes that could benefit from shared tools or improved workflows

    Measurement, Reporting, & Verification (MRV)

    • Actively measuring and reporting on outcomes, or seeking support to do so

    • Interested in testing new peer validation or participatory MRV approaches

    • Facing unique measurement challenges (e.g., language, terrain, field specificity)

    Learning, Templatization & Sharing

    • Willingness to engage in peer learning and knowledge exchange

    • Existing or emerging interest in documenting workflows, curricula, or practices

    • Capacity to contribute resources to a shared solutions library

    Storytelling & Civic Public or Network Engagement

    • Actively documenting impact or interested in learning storytelling practices

    • Clear sense of audience or community to engage with

    • Interest in civic engagement, media, or campaign tools

    Resourcing

    • Have some existing resourcing or a path to raise funding

    • Alignment with potential support from Open Future or partner funders

    • Annual budget and fundraising needs that support fellowship-level participation

    Governance

    • Internal decision-making practices or pathways for shared governance

    • Experience or interest in participatory models

Selection Priorities

We will prioritize candidates who:

  • Add to regional, sectoral, and community diversity within the cohort

  • Advance equity and demonstrate resilience strategies at local community levels 

  • Have operational and community management capacity to engage with the program

  • Are already measuring outcomes or interested in peer-based validation

  • Show readiness to templatize and share their practices and processes 

  • Have storytelling skills or a strong desire to build them

  • Are actively working on resourcing pathways (such as regional portfolio creation, or fundraising for tool co-development)

Fellows are selected based on their alignment with our core criteria, including operational capacity, strong use cases for community coordination, and a spirit of collaborative learning.

    • Diversity of the Cohort: We aim for a diverse mix of geographies, sectors, project types, and communities served

    • Capacity to Engage: Applicants must demonstrate sufficient staffing or team bandwidth to participate fully, including trainings, workshops, and peer calls

    • Alignment with Program Goals: Fellows should be engaged in active work that aligns with core focus areas: food systems, ecological restoration, community wellness, or infrastructure

    • Tool Readiness: Strong candidates are actively seeking ways to improve coordination, measurement, or storytelling—and open to experimenting with shared tools

    • Contribution to the Commons: We look for participants who can share their practices, resources, or stories in ways that others in the field can learn from

    • Resourcing Pathways: We aim to support efforts where this Fellowship could help unlock further support—whether through exposure, capacity-building, or tool co-development

    • Values & Mindset: Collaboration, humility, and a willingness to build shared infrastructure are core to our work. We prioritize those excited to contribute to a larger field of practice.

Fellowship Includes:

  • Access to the Open Impact platform for your organization, including access to tools for program management, measurement, reporting, publishing, and knowledge-sharing

  • An individualized workplan focused on your project, organization, or network’s goals and priorities

  • Onboarding, technical support, and training

  • Cohort networking calls and peer learning workshops, based on needs and opportunities identified within the cohort

  • Templates and toolkits for reporting and storytelling

  • Travel stipends for key convenings (where applicable)

  • Opportunities to shape new tools and shared infrastructure

  • Inclusion in, and access to, a growing resource library of replicable practices

  • Visibility to a curated global ecosystem of practitioners, subject matter experts, service providers, and funders

Program Outcomes: Highlights from our first cohort

In its inaugural year, the Regional Resilience Fellowship brought together a powerful cohort of 21 organizations working across 35 project sites in 16 countries. These Fellows collectively supported over 25,000 people through projects that spanned regenerative agriculture, water access, food sovereignty, reforestation, community media, wellness, and cooperative finance.

Together, Fellows co-developed shared tools for storytelling, program delivery, and impact tracking—while surfacing replicable models and strategies that are now helping shape a broader infrastructure for community-led resilience.

From strengthening agroecological practices in the Andes-Amazon, to advancing farming networks in the U.S. Southeast, to building civic media coalitions across borders, the first cohort affirmed that frontline innovation is not only happening—it is ready to scale on its own terms.

Apply now

If you feel aligned with this initiative, we invite you to explore joining us as an Open Future Coalition Regional Resilience Fellow. To get started, we ask that you fill out our assessment form to help us learn more about your regional efforts for consideration.

Applications to join the cohort will be reviewed on a rolling basis until the cohort is filled, and we will follow up with applicants within 30 days of receipt.

Key Dates:

Applications Due: September 15th
Cohort Announced: October 15th
Program Launch: November 1st

We look forward to hearing from you.