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8/28/24- Selected applicants have been notified of their acceptance. Applications for the 2024-2025 Cohort are now closed. Questions can be sent to our team at fellowship@urbedadvocates.org.
What is the Fellowship?
Beginning at UrbEd, Inc. in 2019, the Fellowship Program provides high school students from Philadelphia schools the opportunity to learn extensively about organizing in Philly. Where the program centers the completion of a culminating advocacy project, the primary focus of the program is to develop and sustain youth organizers and their efforts through…
• Collaboration and collective building with fellow cohort members and youth organizers
• Guest speakers and conversations with city officials, organizers, artists, and change-makers.
• Engaging facilitated workshops and teach-ins
• Sustained individual and group mentorship and support
• Multiple trips a month across Philadelphia, to cultural, arts, and historical institutions + other locations that have been crucial sites of advocacy and collective building
Program Overview
• Participation in the program is free, including additional financial assistance for transportation where needed*
• Participants will receive a stipend for their participation, divided into three payments distributed throughout the program.
• The program is open to all high school students in the Philadelphia school district! We encourage students from neighborhood schools to apply!
Program Session
• September 28, 2024 to May 10, 2025
• In person sessions every other Saturday from 11:00-2:00pm* @ 1521 Locust St., Suite 1001, 19102 + other engaging program and mentor meetings times TBA.
Program Expectations
All fellows are expected to…
• Engage critically in conversations and show up for themselves and others in the cohort
• Attend program meetings, field trips, public events about organizing justice.
• Completing guided assignments and work on advocacy capstone outside of meeting times (such as reading and writing prompts)
• Fellows will be required to communicate with the coordinators from the UrbEd team (especially schedule conflicts and questions)
• Participate fully in envisioning and completing capstone project with whole group (both in meeting and outside assignments)
Program Pillars/ Our Dreams for the Fellows
Participation in the fellowship and its related programming has been created to center the following…
1. Through the program, fellows will gain a complex understanding of Philadelphia’s organizing history. A comprehension not only of their causes, but the various methods they used to leverage their collective power, outcomes, and how they envisioned freedom. To piece together trips to the physical locations, various histories, and reflective conversation, creates a more in-depth view of organizing. In considering the negotiating of care, empathy, power, expression, and resistance, fellows will have an informed framework as they continue to navigate life in and out of our schools.
2. Through the program, fellows will be a part of a community. We show up and belong to many communities — and envision the fellowship as a site where no aspect needs to be made smaller. While the program centers learning, engagement, process, and the culminating project, the most critical focus remains to develop and sustain a collective. The direction of the program: what is being asked of the fellows (and UrbEd team), programming, and communication, must be done with the intention of creating (Perhaps for some, the very first) space where they can show up vulnerable and realize their own agency.
3. Through the program, fellows will act on their agency. As a way to take action, the fellows will utilize the concluding months of the program to conceptualize, plan, and complete a project focusing on a topic regarding Philly Youth. Through the sustained support before, during, and after the projects and a breadth of information about instances of activism, we hope they feel positioned to change their realities. To act on one’s agency is to be able to show up for yourself and those around you, to reclaim power in spaces it has been denied to you, to care for yourself and others in the process. These ways of being are what make lasting, substantive, change in the city, in schools, and every community.
On Movements!: Collective Organizing and Resistance
Weeks 1-3:
Organizing and Schools
Weeks 4-8:
Understanding Philly Power Systems
Weeks 9-13:
Collective Frameworks for Liberation/ Making a Movement
Weeks 14-15:
Freedom Dreaming/ Imagining our Future
This fellowship means a lot to me...When I first started the fellowship, I never thought I would make such good connections, meet such amazing people, and join such an awesome organization that will constantly support me. ...Being a part of the UrbEd family means being a part of something bigger than myself, something I've wanted for a really long time.
This fellowship means a lot to me because it allowed to expand and broaden my perspectives on issues I never considered before... This fellowship has allowed me to realize there are other organizations who are fighting to change the same issues and by working together, we can make that vision an reality.
This fellowship means helping people, and understanding the ins and outs... The fact that I can try and create a new system to let people have the opportunity to get help is great to me. The entire system, from learning about different political activists, to different movements, to starting movements, is something I did not think I would get anywhere else.
