Sharing Nicely

A few months ago, I received a fellowship from the Shuttleworth Foundation to work on open and collaborative resources (a code for setting up the P2PU and supporting OER in Africa). The idea of the fellowships is to find entrepreneurs and innovators who are working towards social change and give them the means to achieve their dreams. Putting it like that sounds a bit like development jargon, so I’ll explain what it means in plain language, give some background on how the fellowship works and why I think it’s a fantastic way of supporting social entrepreneurs – and maybe model that other foundations might want to consider adopting?

The Shuttleworth fellowship in three steps:

1 – Cover the basics Provide sufficient funds for fellows to cover their living expenses so they don’t need to worry about making money. Even it it isn’t a huge amount of money this takes away a big psychological weight and distraction. There is also flexibility to generate extra income if needed, because fellows are free to take on additional consulting work as long as it doesn’t distract from the objectives of the fellowship.

2 –  Give them some tools It’s obvious that there are lots of things one needs to work effectively, and many of them cost money. Computers, phones, communication and — a big one — travel just to name a few. It can be a real hassle to find the money for a new computer when the old one breaks or get funding to attend a workshop. The fellowship includes separate expense and travel budgets, which put an end to all that. There are also things that are difficult to do for individuals in start-up mode, like entering contracts with companies for services they provide to your project. The foundation can help with a few of these – it isn’t a one-stop support shop for fellows, but it makes some of the most difficult things a little easier, while you are busy setting up your own organisational infrastructure.

3 – Then strap a jetpack on their backs and hand them the match The way this works is that I can take a certain part of my fellowship grant (remember, this is my potential income) and re-invest into my own projects. The foundation then multiplies my investment by a factor of 10 or 15 (or 20, if it’s a collaboration with another fellow) making it a sizable amount of project funding. There is of course an approval process that project ideas have to go through, but it’s efficient and fast, because the overall goals of the fellowship are agreed already and the projects have to support them. For me this was the real killer – the incentive structure seemed to fit perfectly to what I was trying to do.

Benefits

Thinking about social entrepreneurship in this way has a few important benefits, both for the foundation and the fellow. For the foundation, it’s a good way to identify people who are so committed to their ideas, that they will invest their own money to build their dreams. As Steve Song — another fellow — says (at least I heard it from him first) it’s the difference between the chicken and the pig. When it comes to breakfast (eggs and bacon) the chicken is “invested”, but the pig is “committed”. The idea is to get the fellows to commit to their own projects. And for the fellows, it gives them access to seed/VC funding that would otherwise be hard to obtain. The reality of social entrepreneurship is that even the best ideas will typically not generate millions of dollars in profits, lead to lucrative IPOs or attract buy out offers from Google. In other words, they are not as attractive to a typical VC funder. There are some indications that this is slowly changing, but for now, one person with a powerful idea for social change and the passion to make it happen will typically have a hard time pitching for angel funds, which is exactly what’s needed to get going.

Photo by Marcus Ramberg (CC BY NC 2.0)

Challenges

So far so good. I think it’s obvious by now, that I am a big fan of this fellowship model, but of course there are things about it that I find challenging as well:

One year is short Once the fellowship starts, you have a year to submit your project proposals, get them approved, start implementing and — because your fellowship is reviewed for potential renewal after 9 months – even less time to show results. That’s not a lot of time, if you are (just an example) trying to change the tertiary education landscape. And while it’s good to have clear goals for the short and medium-term, it can be difficult to commit fully to the long-term if there is uncertainty about the foundation (pun intended) of your planning beyond the next 6-9 months. I am all for keeping people on their toes, but stretching the first year of the fellowship to 18 months, with a lead-in period, could be an option.

No more excuses You’re under pressure to deliver. Since most of the things that usually distract and slow you down are taken care of, there are no more excuses not to succeed. It’s up to you and with that comes some pressure to deliver something that makes a real difference. Especially for people transiting from academic posts into social entrepreneurship it can be daunting to stop thinking and writing, and start organising and doing. I wouldn’t want to change this, it’s a challenge that I am finding myself thrive on, but it is something that I hadn’t really anticipated and a bit of a culture shock. And yes, that was a huge generalisation about academia – forgive me!

Steve Vosloo, a fellow fellow, pointed me to this set of blog posts that compares different leadership development / fellowship programmes. It will be interesting to look in some detail how different initiatives do things differently – and what they find works best. And this is what a day at the office looks like!