What We're Noticing About 2012 Applicants

It’s always encouraging and, frankly, fun to dive in the statistics of our Fellowship applicants. As one of the few open seed funding processes for social entrepreneurs, we're often one of the first to notice emerging trends in the sector. Here are a few.

The 2012 Echoing Green Fellowship and Black Male Achievement Fellowship application process officially closed two weeks ago, and we’ve been hard at work evaluating all 3,508 applications—an increase of 23 percent over last year, and a staggering 228 percent increase from 2010. We had applicants from a record 128 different countries, an 8% increase over last year. From our vantage point, this increase is yet another stake in the ground that the social entrepreneurship field is growing, perhaps at warp speed.

Plus, we continue to see more applicants launching for-profit and hybrid organizations. Last year, for-profits and hybrids made up 31 percent of all applications—this year that increased 7 percentage points to 38 percent.

Another trend that Echoing Green and our peer organizations are examining is the decrease of women in the social innovation sector. The last six out of seven Echoing Green Fellowship classes have been majority male and the past two years have seen a particularly sharp dip in women Fellows. This year is no different. We had 25 percent more men apply for our Fellowships, yet only 8 percent more women. While we’re thrilled with the increase of women applicants, there’s more work to do. We’ll continue to encourage women leaders to engage their networks in finding and nurturing more women social entrepreneurs.

This year, Echoing Green is honored to work with the Open Society Foundations to launch a new 18-month Black Male Achievement Fellowship (BMA) program that will invest in emerging leaders committed to improving the life outcomes of black men and boys, especially those working in the areas of education, family, and work. The vast majority of the BMA applicants were from the United States, and 72 percent of them were male (which contributed to our increase in male applicants). Seventy percent of the applicants presented organizations that aim to tackle Education, Poverty Alleviation, and Economic Development.

We remain inspired by the Fellowship applicants’ bold ideas to drive positive change throughout our world. Check out this illustration of the words most commonly used to describe their social change idea.

A special thank you goes out to our Fast Track Partners, who were instrumental in helping us find this first round of the world’s most promising solutionists.

Join our email list to be the first to hear about the next steps in our selection process.

We also want to know, what do you think of these trends? Are they signs of good things to come? Or something else?

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