2024 Fellowship for Leaders

in Higher Education in Prison

Fellowship Fact Sheet

Thank you for your interest in the program! Applications are now closed. If you have any questions or comments, please contact Andrea at Andrea@rockwoodleadership.org

UPDATES:

4.2.24 - Session 3 date tentative location has been added.

4.15.24

Edit: 1:30 p.m. CT: Application link is fixed.

11:49 a.m. CT - The application form is currently down due to an outage at the website that hosts the form. It should be fixed within a couple of hours.

4.10.24 - Session 3 dates have been updated to April 28-May 2, 2025 to accommodate NCHEP. A location for session 3 will be announced soon.

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Who is Rockwood?

Rockwood Leadership Institute (Rockwood) is like a ‘wellness retreat’ for your career and beyond. As one of the premiere leadership training programs in the non-profit sector, Rockwood is famous for alum quitting their jobs in pursuit of a deeper, more values aligned, purpose-forward trajectory. Since 2000, Rockwood has been designing and providing leadership training for non-profit leaders in different sectors from around the world. Partnerships with key organizations for transformative social justice is a core component of Rockwood’s programming approach. Read more about Rockwood’s core practices and the Art of Leadership on our website for more information about what fellows will learn.

What is the program?

The Fellowship for Leaders in Higher Education in Prison is a brand new, exclusive, leadership development fellowship for formerly incarcerated leaders in the Higher Ed in Prison field supported by Ascendium. The Fellowship, designed by Rockwood staff, trainers, and system-impacted consultants, is designed to strengthen and cohere a core group of formerly incarcerated leaders working in the HEP sector. The Fellowship will consist of three in-person weeklong sessions in September, December, and April, individual professional coaching and peer coaching between September and June, participant support funds, and virtual Community Calls and webinars in between in-person sessions to grow the synergy and connection between the cohort and offer leaders additional chances to build concrete management skills.

Fellowship Purpose

To deepen the pipeline of formerly incarcerated leaders across the HEP field by increasing leadership capacities, strengthening relationships within and across HEP, and creating fertile ground for leaders at all levels to engage in powerfully collaborative and interconnected ways.

Fellowship Outcomes

Increased personal leadership capacity
Deepened ability to create and nurture partnerships
Ability to align with other leaders, organizations, and networks towards ambitious goals and a unified vision
Forge strong partnerships across the boundaries of issue area, race, geography, and social identity

How much does it cost?

This Fellowship is tuition-free! Full tuition, accommodations, and all meals during the residential training sessions will be covered by Rockwood. Participants will be responsible for their own travel costs to and from the sessions and participants will be reimbursed for training-related expenses (e.g. airfare and other travel costs, at-home meals, child or family care).

Every participant will receive:

$5,000 stipend for completing the fellowship (this stipend is taxable income) to be paid following the first session.
$4,000 in training-related expense reimbursements (including airfare, meals, childcare, etc.)
Access to a pool of $10,000 in accessibility and accommodation funds for any additional needs a participant may have in order to participate

Rockwood expects that organizations, employers, and supervisors will provide support for participants to be fully present and attend the trainings. We encourage applicants to, as part of the application process, ask their organizations for the additional resources they may need to fully participate in the training. Rockwood will also provide letters of support for any participant who needs one.

Fellowship Requirements

This Fellowship includes three in-person week-long retreats and virtual offerings in between retreats. The entire Fellowship will run from September 2024 to June 2025. Participants must be able to attend all three in-person sessions in order to participate in the Fellowship.

In-Person Retreats

Session 1: September 30 - October 4, 2024 | Wingspread, Racine, WI
Session 2: December 9-13, 2024 | Island Palms, San Diego, CA
NOTE NEW DATE Session 3: April 28-May 2, 2025 | Edith Macy, Briarcliff Manor, NY

Additional Commitments

Pre-work before each session and post-session evaluations. Prework may include readings, journaling, worksheets, 360 peer evaluation survey, etc.
Two virtual Community Calls will support participants’ relationship building and learning outside of the structured training session time. Community Calls are tentatively scheduled for October and February and will be around 90 minutes.
Two virtual Webinars will support participants in learning concrete skills in HEP fundraising/grant management and project management. Webinars are tentatively scheduled for November and March and will be around 2 hours.
Individual professional coaching. Each participant will have access to up to four free 1 hour coaching sessions with a Rockwood trainer between September 2024 and June 2025.
Peer-coaching. During the fellowship, participants will be partnered with other fellows to engage in peer coaching over the course of the fellowship.

At Rockwood, we’ve found that being able to commit fully and deeply to all aspects of the program propels leaders’ transformational leadership development. We ask that all fellows sign a contract that states your commitment.

Cohort Selection Criteria

This Fellowship is for formerly incarcerated leaders in the Higher Ed in Prison field. Leaders in non-profit organizations, Universities and colleges, government agencies, state coalitions, etc. that provide HEP programming or work with HEP programming, are all welcome to apply.

This training is limited to 24 participants who:

Are formerly incarcerated leaders or decision makers in the Higher Education in Prison field, preferably those with Higher Education programming experience while incarcerated;
Demonstrate personal/professional readiness to step out of their comfort zone and learn new leadership skills;
Contribute to creating a cohort that is diverse in terms of demographics (such as race, gender identity, and sexual orientation), geography, lived experiences, and organizational strategy;
Commit to full participation in the year-long fellowship, including three in-person retreats, completing any required pre-session work and post-session evaluations.

A note on cohort selection: Rockwood is committed to creating a rich learning experience that is challenging, inclusive, and fruitful. In addition to demographic diversity, such as race, age, gender identity, sexual orientation, etc, we also look at cohort composition as it relates to: proximity to power, organization types, regions, roles in community, among other attributes. We make difficult decisions about equally strong and impressive candidates and our choices do not reflect the valuing of one individual candidate over another.

How to Apply

Applications are now closed. If you were unable to apply by the April 22 deadline and are still interested, please contact Andrea at andrea@rockwoodleadership.org for a possible extension.

The application is our first chance to get to know you, so please be detailed and candid when answering. Consider reviewing Rockwood’s core practices and the Art of Leadership on our website to help you prepare for your application. We especially want to know how you relate to the cohort selection criteria (including your role within the HEP field specifically) and how participating in this fellowship would benefit both you and the HEP field as a whole.

Applications close April 22 and applicants who are selected to move on will schedule 1:1 interviews with Rockwood in the month of May.

Final decisions will be shared in July 2024.

QUESTIONS TO ASK YOURSELF BEFORE APPLYING

It is important that you understand that Rockwood’s approach is ideal for leaders who are ready to step outside of their comfort zone, and have a strong desire to learn with and from others.

Meet the Trainers

J.K. NELSON

J.K. Nelson has wide and deep experience as a manager in various arenas, ranging from electoral (Field Director for over two dozen state legislative and congressional campaigns and New York State Deputy Finance Director for a Presidential candidate), VP at high performing nonprofits, labor organizing, and educational advocacy spaces.

J.K. has helped mobilize over 5 million people over the course of his organizing career. His management practice is undergoing ongoing refinement in the crucible of many past, present, and—most assuredly—future mistakes. J.K.'s managerial experience runs the spectrum including building teams from scratch, inheriting teams, managing complex organizational change, managing through layers of management, managing toward ambitious/inspiring goals, and managing major organizational cultural shifts.

YESHI NEUMANN

Yeshi has had two principal callings for her work in the world. Since 1988, Yeshi has facilitated hundreds of trainings on leadership, women’s leadership, disrupting white supremacy/racism and other social oppressions, conflict resolution, effective communication, family healing and mindfulness. For the last 12 years she has been a trainer with Rockwood Leadership Institute, and facilitated the fellowships for leaders in the immigration rights and early childhood education spaces. She loves coaching leaders to become even more powerful, creative and resourceful at the same time that they commit themselves more fully to their own well-being. As an actively practicing midwife since 1970, Yeshi has had the amazing good fortune of receiving new life into her hands over and over again including her 4 granddaughters. Her work of “catching babies” has been inseparable from her dedication to making affordable, respectful, culturally relevant healthcare a right for everyone, not a privilege. Yeshi’s social identities include white, jewish, cisgendered bisexual woman, mostly able-bodied person, and elder. She is dedicated to the practice of meditation, Qi Gong, and dancing. She lives in Coastal Me Wok territory (Muir Beach, California).