We’re thrilled to announce our second cohort of our Blog-Building Intensive Fellowship!
This year’s fellows are a group 25 of impressive progress thinkers and writers, selected from a pool of over 350 applicants. They are founders, researchers, academics, policy-makers, capital allocators, and journalists from across the U.S., Canada, Germany, Switzerland, Ireland, the U.K., and Hong Kong. They will be writing about nuclear fusion, reproductive longevity, space manufacturing, housing reform, urban mobility, industrial policy, AI safety and opportunity, biotechnology, European innovation, eco-modernism and so much more.
When we launched the first iteration of our Blog-Building Intensive Fellowship last year, a crucial open question was “is there enough high-caliber progress talent out there worth accelerating?” The answer, with our first cohort, was a resounding “yes!” Our second cohort has shown that last year was no fluke.
This year we were able to attract even more qualified applicants than last year. With around 40 finalists who made it through the written application, essay reviews, and two rounds of interviews, it was again hard to select just 15 or 20, which is why we’ve expanded the program and invited 25 writers to become 2024 Roots of Progress fellows.
As we begin our second annual fellowship program, we are thrilled with the caliber of the fellows who are choosing to dedicate 10-15 hours a week over the course of this 8-week intensive to studying progress and writing about it. Most of them have full-time careers and their willingness to invest this time—unpaid!—in this work speaks volumes about their commitment to increasing their impact as intellectual entrepreneurs for progress. At a time when many bemoan the decreasing intellectual capacity of young people and are worried about the prevalence of anxiety and a doom-and-gloom mindset, it’s heartening to see their passion to write essays to make progress real. It bodes well for our organization, the progress studies movement, and the future of humanity.
The 8-week intensive starts August 22nd. A newly-developed onboarding program leading up to the intensive will enable the fellows to get to know each other, study key progress essays, and get set up with key systems so they can hit the ground running.
During the 8-week intensive they will:
- Meet and learn from our seventeen expert program advisors, including industry professionals, progress intellectuals, writers, and audience-building experts
- Hone their writing skills in a structured course focused on long-form, persuasive writing for a general audience
- Receive feedback and guidance from several professional editors (for many, a first in their careers) and from each other, through bi-weekly structured writing “gyms”
- Master strategies and tactics to grow the audience for their work.
- Complete four two-week writing sprints and publish four essays
Our goal is to help the fellows 2x their potential—and to build a community that sustains them in their careers as progress intellectuals for years to come.
We’re thrilled to yet again have such a great community come together. The tide of history isn’t always carried by the side with the best ideas. It is carried by the side with the intellectuals who are best at presenting and arguing for its ideas. Here’s to 25 intellectuals being empowered to establish the intellectual base of the progress movement!