Fellowships Named for Bertelsmann Founder to Help Public-Service Innovators Acquire For-Profit Skills

TOOLS AND TRAINING

By Heather Joslyn

This fall, five to seven innovators in the field of public service will begin year-long fellowships that will pay them each nearly $53,000, pair them with mentors from the business world, and place them in work assignments at a variety of companies and programs around the world.

This unusual professional-development opportunity for nonprofit managers comes courtesy of Bertelsmann AG, which created the fellowships in June as an 80th birthday gift for its founder, Reinhard Mohn. Bertelsmann AG, based in Gütersloh, Germany, is among the five largest media corporations in the world, with more than 400 companies under its umbrella, and offices in Europe, North and South America, Asia, and Australia. In 1977, Mr. Mohn also founded the Bertelsmann Foundation to champion innovative solutions to societal problems. It is now the largest private foundation in Germany, giving more than $35-million to charitable programs in 1999-2000, the most recent year for which figures are available.

Leadership training, like the Mohn fellowships seek to provide, is sorely needed in the nonprofit field, says Cheryl L. Dorsey, acting president of the Echoing Green Foundation, in New York. Her organization, for example, sponsors 10 fellowships a year that provide seed money and management advice to individuals who lead charitable projects — for which it receives 1,100 applications annually. “There’s not enough product to support the demand,” she says. She believes that the Mohn fellowships could become a model for other corporate foundations, if those who manage the program carefully evaluate it, develop best practices, and share their knowledge with other for-profit companies.

For its first class of fellows, the Mohn program is looing for people who have started, led, or completed socially relevant projects, says Anette Bickmeyer, the program’s director. The applicant’s project should be characterized by an innovative approach, she says: “A soup kitchen is great, but there should be something new about it.” Special consideration will be given to the project’s cultural context. For instance, she says, an Internet café founded in underdeveloped Belarus might be considered a socially relevant project, while one founded in overdeveloped Manhattan probably wouldn’t be.

Even experience with a failed project would qualify an applicant, she says, if the applicant could explain what skills he or she seeks to ensure the project’s future success. “What we don’t want,” she says, “are people who say, ‘Oh, I’ve always wanted to work for Bertelsmann. I’ve always wanted to help people in Africa, and now you’ve reminded me.’”

Though there are no age or academic requirements for fellowship applicants, Ms. Bickmeyer says, a good command of English is essential.

Unlike some other programs that honor the work of individual innovators, such as the “genius” fellowships given every year by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Mohn awards do not require that applicants be nominated by a third party. “If someone is nominated, they already have a mentor,” says Ms. Bickmeyer. “We’re looking for people no one knows about yet.”

Fellows will be selected at the end of July after a process that will include having finalists travel to Berlin for interviews, she says. They will begin orientation at Bertelsmann’s headquarters in Gütersloh on November 1, she says, and then travel to their work assignments at one of the company’s far-flung offices. Assignments will be determined based on the skills each fellow wants to acquire or improve, which might include business practices or increased familiarity with the news media. A typical fellow, Ms. Bickmeyer says, might spend the year working at Bertelsmann offices in New York, Singapore, and Spain. The program will provide fellows with coaches to help them handle any cultural adjustments that they need to make to work in specific locations, she says.

The program also has opportunities built in for the participants to make connections with people in a wide variety of fields. Throughout the experience, each fellow will be paired with a mentor, she says, and all of the fellows will work together on a project for Bertelsmann AG’s board of directors. Though this is the first year of the fellowship, Ms. Bickmeyer says she’s also looking ahead to creating an alumni network.

She says she also hopes the fellowship program will benefit not just the innovative projects’ leaders, but the projects themselves. Because Bertelsmann has so many media holdings, she says, it might be uniquely suited to spreading the word about the work of not only the fellows but those applicants selected as finalists. And she also suggests that working with Mohn fellows might inspire Bertelsmann employees to become involved in the fellows’ charitable projects.

By placing its fellows in for-profit work environments, Echoing Green’s Ms. Dorsey says, the program may not only broaden the skills of the fellows but also broaden the perspective of the businesspeople they work alongside.

Surita Sandosham, manager of the Rockefeller Foundation’s Next Generation Leadership program, which selects 24 participants each year to study ways to strengthen U.S. democracy, says she applauds the Mohn program as an addition to a small number of leadership-development programs aimed at nonprofit managers. “I don’t think you can have too many of them,” Ms. Sandosham says. “There are a lot of talented people out there, and seven people’s not a lot. But organizations only have so much money.”

She says she hopes the Mohn effort turns to its fellows for guidance in shaping the new program, to give them a greater sense of “ownership” of it. “It’s really important, if you’re recognizing these people as leaders, that you use their expertise,” Ms. Sandosham says.

Ms. Bickmeyer says her hopes for the future of the Mohn fellowships are the same as those of the program’s namesake — to create a legacy of innovation. “He wants people to follow in his footsteps,” she says, “but that doesn’t mean doing what he did. It means finding a new way.”

The deadline for fellowship applications is June 1. Applications, which should include a résumé in chart form and a three-page description of the applicant’s project, can be made online or by mail to: Bertelsmann AG, Reinhard Mohn Fellowship, Postfach 111, 33311 Gütersloh, Germany.

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