i) If I imagine I’m still leading a student group, a few things come to mind:
What does a full time equivalent mean? For instance, I’m skeptical that most undergrads are capable of putting in a full 40 hours/week, but (a) the part-time organizer option is not emphasized other than in passing to say compensation would be pro-rated and (b) the part time hours they do put in have a higher than normal opportunity cost than for an organizer not actively taking courses.
How should I know if I’m a good fit for this fellowship or whether I should apply? For continuity reasons, leadership is often passed to rising second years when the previous leadership graduates. But, it’s a weird position to be in as an 18⁄19 year old who just took on this leadership role and is of the mindset that it seems presumptuous to ask for compensation (if not somehow wrong to be paid for an altruistic effort) to apply for payment. This seems especially true for the people for whom funding would actually make a difference in how much effort they’re able to put in. It might be worth adding a section describing what a good fit looks like or some sort of referral system so that others can suggest good grantees to you.
How many organizers per group are you willing to fund? E.g. if a group has three main leaders/organizers presumably splitting responsibilities because it’s a lot of work for just one person, how should one of them navigate applying for funding when the others aren’t or if one of them has already been funded (this goes back to the presumptuous seeming point above).
ii) For the Century Fellowship:
If someone is considering applying, it seems likely that they’ve already made fairly substantial progress on their project already. How should they navigate whether to apply for the fellowship or to include personal compensation in the budget when seeking funding for their project as a whole?
A referral system seems like a good idea here too for similar reasons.
“Full-time-equivalent” is intended to mean “if you were working full-time, this is how much funding you would receive”. The fellowship is intended for people working significantly less than full-time, and most of our grants have been for 15 hours per week of organizer time or less. I definitely don’t expect undergraduates to be organizing for 40 hours per week.
I think our page doesn’t make this clear enough early on, thanks for flagging it– I’ll make some changes to try and make this clearer.
I think anyone who’s doing student organizing for more than 5 hours per semester should strongly consider applying. I’m sympathetic to people feeling weird about this, but want to emphasize that I think people should consider applying even if they would have volunteered to do the same activities, for two reasons:
I think giving people funding generally causes them to do higher-quality work.
I think receiving funding as an organizer makes it clearer to others that we value this work and that you don’t have to make huge sacrifices to do it, which makes it more likely that other people consider student organizing work.
We’re up for funding any number of organizers per group– in the case you described, I would encourage all the organizers to apply. (We also let group leaders ask for funding for organizers working less than 10 hours per week in their own applications. If two of the organizers were working 10 hours per week or less, it might be faster for one organizer to just include them on their application.)
ii)
(Let me know if I’m answering your question here, it’s possible I’ve misunderstood it.)
I think it’s ultimately up to the person on what they want to do– I think the fellowship will generally allow more freedom than funding for a specific project, come with more benefits (see our program page), and would probably pay a higher rate in terms of personal compensation than many other funding opportunities would. It also has a much higher bar for funding than I would generally apply for funding specific projects.
In the application form, we ask people if they would be interested in receiving a separate grant for their project or plans if they weren’t offered the Century Fellowship– we’ve funded many applicants who were below the bar for the fellowship itself that way. So if someone’s interested in both, I think it makes sense to just apply to the Century Fellowship, and we can also consider them for alternative funding.
For both programs, we don’t have an explicit referral system, but we do take into account what references have to say about the applicant (if the applicant provides references).
Yeah, agree with this as a student. I’m very keen on applying, but I have no reference for what the expectations are. I get that the Fellowship is flexible by design, but a point of reference (such as a hypothetical or real life example) would really help.
WRT to your second point, I actually dont think paying is as big of a deal as people are implying. I worked with very competent national-level student organisers who were willing to put in wayyyyyyyyyy more than 40 hours a week for their causes and even get arrested or forgo prestigious awards/school for them. However, the types of people who are active in this way are also mindful of academic and career expectations.
It’s slightly taboo to treat social causes as sources of money, but I find that young people are forced to make this decision eventually. Society tells them any level of societal impact is subordinate to any level of career progression, so it’s practically inevitable to lose competent organisers who take the first part time job that they’re way overqualified for in practice. I’ve seen it happen plenty.
This of course changes the way you approach recruitment, but IMO that’s a good (and not entirely different) problem from what you had relying solely on volunteers.
A few questions mostly not relevant to me:
i) If I imagine I’m still leading a student group, a few things come to mind:
What does a full time equivalent mean? For instance, I’m skeptical that most undergrads are capable of putting in a full 40 hours/week, but (a) the part-time organizer option is not emphasized other than in passing to say compensation would be pro-rated and (b) the part time hours they do put in have a higher than normal opportunity cost than for an organizer not actively taking courses.
How should I know if I’m a good fit for this fellowship or whether I should apply? For continuity reasons, leadership is often passed to rising second years when the previous leadership graduates. But, it’s a weird position to be in as an 18⁄19 year old who just took on this leadership role and is of the mindset that it seems presumptuous to ask for compensation (if not somehow wrong to be paid for an altruistic effort) to apply for payment. This seems especially true for the people for whom funding would actually make a difference in how much effort they’re able to put in. It might be worth adding a section describing what a good fit looks like or some sort of referral system so that others can suggest good grantees to you.
How many organizers per group are you willing to fund? E.g. if a group has three main leaders/organizers presumably splitting responsibilities because it’s a lot of work for just one person, how should one of them navigate applying for funding when the others aren’t or if one of them has already been funded (this goes back to the presumptuous seeming point above).
ii) For the Century Fellowship:
If someone is considering applying, it seems likely that they’ve already made fairly substantial progress on their project already. How should they navigate whether to apply for the fellowship or to include personal compensation in the budget when seeking funding for their project as a whole?
A referral system seems like a good idea here too for similar reasons.
i)
“Full-time-equivalent” is intended to mean “if you were working full-time, this is how much funding you would receive”. The fellowship is intended for people working significantly less than full-time, and most of our grants have been for 15 hours per week of organizer time or less. I definitely don’t expect undergraduates to be organizing for 40 hours per week.
I think our page doesn’t make this clear enough early on, thanks for flagging it– I’ll make some changes to try and make this clearer.
I think anyone who’s doing student organizing for more than 5 hours per semester should strongly consider applying. I’m sympathetic to people feeling weird about this, but want to emphasize that I think people should consider applying even if they would have volunteered to do the same activities, for two reasons:
I think giving people funding generally causes them to do higher-quality work.
I think receiving funding as an organizer makes it clearer to others that we value this work and that you don’t have to make huge sacrifices to do it, which makes it more likely that other people consider student organizing work.
We’re up for funding any number of organizers per group– in the case you described, I would encourage all the organizers to apply. (We also let group leaders ask for funding for organizers working less than 10 hours per week in their own applications. If two of the organizers were working 10 hours per week or less, it might be faster for one organizer to just include them on their application.)
ii)
(Let me know if I’m answering your question here, it’s possible I’ve misunderstood it.)
I think it’s ultimately up to the person on what they want to do– I think the fellowship will generally allow more freedom than funding for a specific project, come with more benefits (see our program page), and would probably pay a higher rate in terms of personal compensation than many other funding opportunities would. It also has a much higher bar for funding than I would generally apply for funding specific projects.
In the application form, we ask people if they would be interested in receiving a separate grant for their project or plans if they weren’t offered the Century Fellowship– we’ve funded many applicants who were below the bar for the fellowship itself that way. So if someone’s interested in both, I think it makes sense to just apply to the Century Fellowship, and we can also consider them for alternative funding.
For both programs, we don’t have an explicit referral system, but we do take into account what references have to say about the applicant (if the applicant provides references).
Yeah, agree with this as a student. I’m very keen on applying, but I have no reference for what the expectations are. I get that the Fellowship is flexible by design, but a point of reference (such as a hypothetical or real life example) would really help.
WRT to your second point, I actually dont think paying is as big of a deal as people are implying. I worked with very competent national-level student organisers who were willing to put in wayyyyyyyyyy more than 40 hours a week for their causes and even get arrested or forgo prestigious awards/school for them. However, the types of people who are active in this way are also mindful of academic and career expectations.
It’s slightly taboo to treat social causes as sources of money, but I find that young people are forced to make this decision eventually. Society tells them any level of societal impact is subordinate to any level of career progression, so it’s practically inevitable to lose competent organisers who take the first part time job that they’re way overqualified for in practice. I’ve seen it happen plenty.
This of course changes the way you approach recruitment, but IMO that’s a good (and not entirely different) problem from what you had relying solely on volunteers.