Root & Rise Fellowship

Root & Rise is a 6-month fellowship that nurtures early-career leaders who want to learn to navigate complexity, hold power with integrity, and drive systems change across climate, energy, and civic life.

Everything in the program is built around practice. Fellows grow by doing the work. Learning happens through structured mentorship, peer circles, and an applied project that challenges or transforms existing systems so they work for all living beings.

The result is leadership that is collective, sustained, and rooted in real conditions.

Program Structure

This fellowship is built around a simple truth: lasting change requires more than passion. It requires seeing clearly, moving strategically, and sustaining yourself for the long haul.

Root

Grounding in who you are, what you stand for, and how systems, power, and place shape the landscape you work within.

Read the Landscape

Understand how climate, energy, and governance decisions actually get made
See how power moves through institutions, funding, and media
Use tools like AI and data thoughtfully. As part of a broader toolkit, not a silver bullet
Find real leverage points instead of chasing trends

Rise

Building strategic, narrative, partnership, and financial capacity to move power in ways that sustain both people and ecosystems.

Rise with Precision

Craft strategic narratives that center dignity and long-term vision
Navigate media, international forums, and cross-sector partnerships
Build alliances rooted in shared purpose, not just branding
Develop financial resilience for your organization or initiative

Sustain

Developing the capacity to hold power, grief, responsibility, and conflict in ways that do not break people, fracture relationships, or reproduce harm.

Sustain the Work

Explore how your history and patterns shape how you lead
Stay present under pressure without burning out
Lead ethically within hierarchical cultures and institutions
Build organizational cultures that can hold integrity, conflict, grief, and growth

The Five Components

The fellowship is delivered not a linear curriculum, but a living system designed to meet you where you are and grow with you over time.

Learning Modules: Interactive workshops led by regional and global practitioners who have lived this work, spanning all three pillars: Root, Rise, and Sustain. These sessions blend frameworks with lived experience, giving you tools you can actually use.
Mentorship: You'll be paired with a seasoned regional or international leader. Someone who understands the terrain you're navigating. This is a space for honest guidance, accountability, and the kind of applied learning that only comes through relationship.
Applied Leadership Project: The fellowship isn't preparation for future work; it's embedded in your real work now. You'll develop or strengthen an initiative of your own, with support from mentors and peers, culminating in a shared presentation at the Root & Rise Forum in August 2026.
Peer Learning Circles: Monthly facilitated gatherings where your cohort reflects together, shares stories, and works through challenges collectively. These circles build the trust and mutual insight that sustain leaders long after the program ends.
Alumni Network: Upon completion, you join the Collective Action Center Network a supportive environment of collaborators, mentors, and co-builders who continue learning from and supporting one another. The fellowship ends, but the ecosystem doesn't.

By the end of the fellowship, you'll be equipped with more than knowledge and skills. You'll have the grounded awareness to read the landscape clearly and lead in complexity with intention.

FAQ

Practice : Fellows develop capacities through real-world application
Systems change focus: Every applied project must challenge or transform existing systems so they work for all living beings
Coach-ability over credentials: We select for clarity of purpose, reflective ability, and courage to act.
Embedded support: 1:1 mentorship with milestone accountability and peer learning circles.
Sustained engagement: Post-fellowship alumni network with ongoing learning opportunities.

What Makes This Different?

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Many leadership programs develop knowledgeable, motivated people. Root & Rise goes further. We build the conditions for that knowledge to become practice, for individual talent to become collective power, and for inspiration to become sustained change.

Early-career leaders in climate, civic, and community work are ready to do this work. What they need are spaces that match their ambition: spaces where systems thinking is applied under real conditions, where networks are built to last, and where fellows return to their contexts equipped to transform them, not just endure them.

Root & Rise exists to be that space. The kind of leadership systems change requires is practiced, relational, courageous, and sustained. That is what we grow here.

Why this fellowship exists?

2 Our Selection Approach:

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This fellowship exists to support people whose leadership in systems change would be genuinely strengthened by this program. What matters to us is honest reflection. We are interested in how you actually think, where you are in your journey, what tensions you are sitting with, and what drives your growth from the inside. We care about what is alive in you and what is ready to shift.

Eligibility:

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Aged 21 to 40
Early career (0–5 years of experience)
Based in or from the Asia-Pacific region. If you are not originally from the region, a minimum of five years residency is required to be accepted into the fellowship.
Comfortable understanding, communicating, and presenting in English
Able to commit to biweekly Saturday sessions (May–October) and the in-person Taiwan gathering (August 24–26)
The program currently invites individuals residing in American Samoa; Aotearoa New Zealand; Australia; Brunei; Cambodia; China; Cook Islands; Federated States of Micronesia; Fiji; French Polynesia; Guam; Hawaiʻi; Hong Kong; Indonesia; Japan; Kiribati; Korea, North (DPRK); Korea, South (ROK); Laos; Macao; Malaysia; Marshall Islands; Mongolia; Myanmar; Nauru; New Caledonia; Niue; Northern Mariana Islands; Palau; Papua New Guinea; Philippines; Pitcairn Islands; Samoa; Singapore; Solomon Islands; Taiwan; Thailand; Timor-Leste; Tokelau; Tonga; Tuvalu; Vanuatu; Vietnam; and Wallis and Futuna to apply.
Working in or connected to climate, energy, civic, or community change

Important Dates:

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Application deadline: March 31, 2026
Interviews: Early April 2026
Final decisions: Mid-April 2026
Online sessions: May–October 2026 (bi-weekly, Saturday mornings)
Taiwan in-person gathering: August 24–26, 2026

Our Story

Root & Rise was born from a recognition: across the Asia-Pacific, too many brilliant leaders burn out, too many values get hollowed out by under-resourced organizations, and too many movements cycle through people instead of building what lasts. This fellowship is our response to those root causes. The inaugural cohort launches in Taiwan, in partnership with extraordinary collaborators on the ground.