While being chosen as an Earthshot Prize Finalist or Winner is a tremendous milestone, innovators often face hurdles in scaling their solutions at speed.
How do you lead and inspire your organisation? How do you tell your story in captivating ways? How do you secure the investment needed for rapid acceleration?
To help our Finalists unlock their growth and answer these questions, we developed the Fellowship – a year-long programme of masterclasses, coaching, workshops, network events and funding opportunities.
Designed in partnership with IDEO and supported by our Global Alliance of Partners, the Fellowship offers unique, one-to-one support that’s tailored for every Finalist’s solution and organisation – running every year for each new cohort.
2022 Finalists celebrating completing the first-ever Fellowship Retreat
2023 Finalists taking part in The Earthshot Prize Fellowship Retreat in Singapore
2024 Finalists visit Table Mountain during the Fellowship programme in Cape Town
The support of our Fellowship programme means equipping leaders with the tools, skills and confidence to take their teams and organisations to scale. It means turbocharging growth by connecting Finalists with funding or helping them understand how to build sustainable business models. It means helping them tell their story to the world through speaking opportunities, filmmaking and media events.
Every year, this one-of-a-kind programme opens doors and unlocks exciting new opportunities for our Finalists.
The Fellowship offers unmatched visibility, connections, and credibility for our Finalists – which can all turn into powerful new partnerships and investments for scale. Together with our partners, we have so far catalysed £77M in funding, resources and pro-bono support to accelerate our Finalists.
And we continue growing: now with four cohorts and 60 Finalists, we have a wealth of insights about what environmental innovators need to scale. With this knowledge, we can continue building a unique and impactful environmental accelerator.
One of the most powerful networking opportunities the Fellowship has access to is Earthshot Week itself.
This year, all eyes are on our Finalists as we invite the world to Cape Town to celebrate climate creativity. Influential partners, funders, and thought leaders, as well as the biggest names in environmentalism, take part in a week of events to accelerate action.
Our Finalists will come away from this week with a wealth of contacts, a mind full of inspiring ideas, and newfound fame on a global stage.
Our 2024 Finalists have just completed a five-day retreat in Cape Town packed with expert advice, collaborative workshops, and, of course, plenty of local South African experiences.
After arriving in South Africa, the Finalists travelled to a stunning hotel on the outskirts of Cape Town, where they spent time getting to know each other and sharing stories about their backgrounds and what their solutions mean to them.
On the second day, the cohort took part in storytelling masterclasses with YouTube, Bloomberg, and the filmmakers, The Collins Brothers. Communicating their mission can be as important as the solution itself. In these sessions, Finalists learnt how to create multi-channel content that tells powerful narratives and inspires action.
“The issue is always, you’ve got this very technical solution, you’ve also got an emotive hook, how do you put those two together? The “hourglass” framework we learnt about was nice, it helps us keep all our facts and data, just filter it to the right audience.”
Ronald Pfende, 2024 Finalist, d.light
Marisa Drew, CSO of Standard Chartered Bank and Smruti Naik-Jones, CSO of UK & North South Europe, Deloitte, led discussions about the current state and future trends in sustainability, highlighting the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead. With their experience, they shared advice on how to engage with CSOs and corporate leaders to build impactful partnerships.
All this learning and networking was paired with visits to Robben Island, where Nelson Mandela was imprisoned for 18 years, and Table Mountain which gave the Finalists more time to form meaningful bonds and get to know the complex and powerful history of South Africa.
Tom and James Collins from purpose-driven media organisation Rooftop share tips on unlocking storytelling skills
Björn Söderberg, Managing Director, Build up Nepal - 2024 Finalist
Uyunkar Domingo Peas Nampichkai, President of Amazon Sacred Headwaters Alliance - 2024 Finalist
Francis Nderitu, Keep IT Cool, and Desmond Alugnoa, Green Africa Youth Organization, during the 2024 Fellowship Programme
Seeing the power of the bonds that formed this week is the real highlight – in just five days our Finalists came together to learn, problem-solve and create new joint projects and business initiatives.
The connections they made with each other created something that is larger than the sum of its parts, and will lead to exponential growth. Their potential to restore and repair our planet is enormous and the Retreat is the first step towards accelerating their path to scale.
We’re excited for Earthshot Week and the year ahead and looking forward to seeing what they’ll achieve next!
In the mission to repair and regenerate our planet, the work never stops. That’s why we make a long-term commitment to our Finalists to continue to support them way beyond the Prize.
When the excitement and glamour of the Awards is over, the Fellowship will continue. And the work to scale these incredible solutions accelerates.
Want to know more about the Awards? Go to our Cape Town 2024 page for all the details including how to watch and which global environmental influencers will be joining us on stage.
