The Program

Rainer Arnhold Fellows are social entrepreneurs with particularly promising solutions to the big problems in health, poverty, and conservation in the Third World. The Program helps them design their work for maximum impact through an iterative design process focused on scalability. Fellows are recruited through our network of leaders, thinkers, and doers in the social and private sectors. Fellowships are for two years and include:

• An annual week long design-for-scalability course with a dozen Fellows and a select faculty
• A formal interactive redesign of their model with staff every six months
• Mentoring on demand in the interim by staff and faculty
• Staff help with specific needs in delivery of the work
• Facilitated networking with colleagues, including funding of site visits
• A discretionary stipend of $10k/year

Annual Design Course

The Fellows course brings Fellows and faculty together for a week to work on design for maximum impact and scalability. Held in a mountain nature preserve, the course gives Fellows the rare opportunity to focus completely on their ideas and a systematic way to apply them. It has four parts:

• Prepared 10-minute pitch presentations by each Fellow, both to communicate their work to the group and to develop a key communications resource
• Small facilitated groups of Fellows with and without faculty to work through shared specific issues
• Short sessions by Fellows and faculty around critical shared issues like fund-raising, hiring, and building a high-performance organization
• Individual design sessions focused on impact that can go to scale

Staff and Faculty

Mahri Holt is the program manager, and keeps the calm at the center of the storm. She comes from an earlier career in film and occasionally teaches digital storytelling.

Kevin Starr founded and directs the program, and he works individually with each Fellow on design. He is a physician and also the managing director of the Mulago Foundation, which funds the Fellows Program.

Laura Hattendorf mentors Fellows on a range of issues. She is also the portfolio director of the Mulago Foundation. Prior to this work, she had a successful career in business, and was co-Founder and Executive Director of the non-profit Sustainable Conservation for seven years.

Martin Fisher co-founded and is CEO of the iconic NGO KickStart that has taken thousands of African families out of poverty

John Dawson is a Bay Area philanthropist and sought-after board member who built a succession of successful tech companies.

Paul Polak is a reformed psychiatrist who founded the hugely influential NGO IDE and has written the book “Out of Poverty.”

Peter Seligmann founded and is CEO of Conservation International, one of the most important and influential conservation organizations operating today.

Chuck Slaughter built Travelsmith, the online clothing company, then helped build the CFW micro-franchise health clinics in Kenya. He founded and now runs Living Goods in Uganda.

Joel Segre is a successful social entrepreneur (affordable lens implants for cataract surgery) who is a former Rainer Arnhold Fellow and now works with McKinsey.

Cheryl Heller is CEO of Heller Communications Designs, a premier branding firm in New York.

Pascaline Dupas is an economist at UCLA and a key member of MIT’s Poverty Action Lab, focused on the evaluation of solutions to poverty.

Who We Look For

People who are a good fit for the Rainer Arnhold Fellows Program have:

• a big and compelling problem to tackle
• an idea that feels scalable
• an entrepreneurial personality and track record
• an obsession with going to scale
• an organization up and running, even if very small
• senior decision-making authority (usually ED/CEO)
• a desire to tackle the process of scalable design
• a full understanding of our design process and tools
• and most importantly, openness to new ideas and the willingness to change course

We actively recruit Fellows via our network, so we do not have a formal application process. We are happy to hear from people who feel that they fit the above description (or suggestions for someone who might), but due to time and capacity constraints it might be a while before you hear back from us.

Other Stuff to Read

• "How we think about impact." a two-page description of our 'simple enough to do, rigorous enough to mean something' approach to assessing impact
• "A brief guide to high impact philanthropy", some ideas about scalability first articulated by Martin Fisher of KickStart
• "Design for scalable impact", the basic design approach that we use with our fellows
• "Go big or go home" a re-working of a brief guide for Stanford Social Innovation Review

Contacts

Mailing Address:

Rainer Arnhold Fellows Program
2435 Polk St, Suite 21
San Francisco, CA 94109

Telephone: (415) 346 - 9649

For more information about the Fellows program, please contact mahri@rainerfellows.org