For the previous three years, Echoing Green has invested follow-on funding in Fellow-led organizations that are increasing racial and ethnic equity in their communities.
As part of the Fellowship, new Echoing Green Fellows receive $80,000 in unrestricted grant funding to provide critical early stage support for social innovators working to address global systemic equity issues.
In funding and beyond, data shows that leaders of color have significantly less access to capital than their white peers, especially when it comes to scaling. Due to risk-averse funding models, social entrepreneurs often cannot access the capital necessary to grow their innovative models of change.
To effect change across inequitable systems, we must invest in leaders of color in a deeper way. Through our follow-on funding program, Echoing Green is deploying capital in an innovative, trust-based, and participatory manner to help social innovators bridge the persistent valley of death in the capital ecosystem, and ultimately scale their systems changing work.
We’re thrilled to announce two additional rounds of follow-on funding, with 52 new investments made in Fellow-led organizations. In these rounds, Echoing Green invested a total $4.8 million in continued support of the Echoing Green community’s exceptional leadership.
In these rounds, two new grant categories were included: leadership grants ($10K) and capacity grants ($15K) to support Fellows who recently graduated from the Fellowship. As with previous cycles, catalytic grants were also distributed to support pilot projects and test bold, new, and unproven ideas ($25K), as well as transformational grants to scale proven models ($100K).
