Dalai Lama Fellowship 2018

Our Fellowship offers emerging leaders a rigorous, interdisciplinary program on ways to be a different kind of leader, a leader that connects and cares for self, extends genuine compassion to others, and works for our common humanity. Fellows cultivate practices in mind training for increasing self-awareness, self-care and resilience, for connecting with others and working across differences, and in building solutions for generations to come. Over the course of a year, with the support of mentors and coaches, each Fellow designs and implements an original Field Project addressing a global challenge.  Upon graduation, Fellows join a LifeLong Community, where they connect with and support each other while continuing to advance their leadership journeys.

To date we have awarded 132 Fellowships.

A Global Leadership Curriculum

Collaborating with experts from around the globe from Thupten Jinpa, the Dalai Lama's translator and renowned author, to Marshall Ganz from the Harvard Kennedy School, over the last six years, we have created a distinctive, immersive leadership curriculum which builds a skill-set, complementary to the cognitive and commercial education that Fellows typically acquire in school.  Our Head, Heart and Hands curriculum has three main components:

Head - Training the mind, exploring inner values, cultivating practices to enhance self awareness

Heart - Harnessing the intelligence of the heart, deepening compassion, practices for working across differences

Hands - Acting now, in community, to benefit the world, building unexpected relationships and leading with the mindset of interdependence

Global Challenges

• Improving cross-cultural and interreligious coopoeration
• Diminishing violence
• Gender equality
• Mitigating economic disparities
• Enhancing environmental sustainability

Eligibility Criteria

This program is focused on next-generation leaders who are enrolled in undergraduate and graduate schools at the time of applying and who intend to be enrolled and on campus during their Fellowship year.

They define next generation leaders as individuals that are born between 1980-1995. In some cases they accept applications from individuals that are no longer enrolled in school but that fall in this age range and that are committed to work in social change.

Selection Criteria

• All of their Fellows propose social change projects in their local communities that address one or more of five key areas (improving cross-cultural and interreligious cooperation, diminishing violence, increasing gender equity, mitigating economic disparity, and enhancing environmental sustainability).
• Fellows must show that they are deeply familiar with the community that they are proposing to work in and with and they also must have a well researched justification for the issue that they are choosing to work on.
• Unlike many other Fellowships, Dalai Lama Fellows is not just focused on social impact. Rather, our focus is on the individual and their inner transformation, and how they learn to lead differently. Therefore evaluating the strength of their project proposal is just as important as evaluating the applicant’s intention and commitment.

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