Press

UPDATE: March 2021 After careful consideration, we announce that we will not operate our Fellowship in the 2021-2022 academic year.   Again this month, we analyzed the data to assess the viability of running our global Fellowship beginning in January 2022. Despite promising signs in some parts of the world and increasing access to vaccines in...

16 December, 2020

What do you do when you run a program that has hundreds of young adults spread across the world for an intentional gap year, and a global pandemic strikes? The only thing you can do: stage an emergency evacuation to bring every kid that’s abroad back home, ASAP. And that’s exactly what Abby Falik, Founder...

03 December, 2020

Over the last year, we’ve worked closely with the team at Schmidt Futures to inform the design and launch of their new initiative to unlock youth talent globally. Rise, an initiative of Schmidt Futures and the Rhodes Trust, is the anchor program of the  Schmidt Futures’s $1 billion philanthropic commitment to identify and support global...

18 November, 2020

In April I faced one of the hardest leadership decisions of my life. Amidst a surging pandemic, our team made the difficult call to suspend our Global Fellowship for 2020-21. We knew, even then, it would not have been aligned with our values to send Fellows into host communities during a global health crisis. But...

09 September, 2020

JULY 13, 2020 – GRAMMY nominated, multi-platinum singer/songwriter Shawn Mendes has launched an initiative through the Shawn Mendes Foundation (SMF), seeking to inspire and empower his fans and today’s youth to bring about positive change in the world and advocate for causes they care about. Today, Shawn and SMF are partnering with the nonprofit organization...

14 July, 2020

Dear friends, The compounding crises of the last few months have been disorienting and heartbreaking, impacting each of us in such different ways. The events of the last week have brought some of those differences to the fore, and I’ve struggled to find the right way to express the outrage and anguish I feel —...

08 June, 2020