A. Community leadership in a person-to-person work world

The mission of Dreamfish Fellows Program is to provide a service learning experience for skillful practitioners to apply their skills to support the growth of Dreamfish as an inclusive, effective global work and learning community. Dreamfish Fellowship is a practice-based collaborative training in community leadership.

Each Dreamfish Fellow brings expertise from a domain - open source social software, organization development, community management, transformative learning and social media.  Learning from each other and mentored by senior leaders in interdisicplinary community development, Fellows facilitate the success of Dreamfish members and build connection to one another as a community team.

Dreamfish Fellows support the development of our diverse work community. Different populations of Dreamfish members have different learning goals and motivations. For those of us who are disadvantaged, experiencing isolation or unemployment, we often are seeking professional experience, skill-building, and increased self-efficacy.  At the same time, for those of us who are experienced professionals and elder members, we often seek to learn technology skills, increase awareness of social justice issues, and create social and environmental impact. Located in Africa, North America, Latin America, Europe, or Asia, we enter with different cultural contexts for work and seek to learn to work effectively across culture.

Dreamfish Fellows will support projects in the areas of Community Management, Dreamfish Group facilitation, Project Coaching and Mentorship, Governance, Dreamfish Labs learning events, and multicultural capacity-building. Dreamfish Fellows help members in developing learning plans, pairing with members for coaching and mentorship, sharing best practices and becoming rooted in the work culture and the community. In the process, members learn new skills, gain competencies, learn about multi-cultural communication and social justice, make a social impact, and experience meaning and purpose.

B. Cohort Training and Service Learning Model

The fellowship is structured in a service learning cohort model. The group develops and provides a container for Fellows to give and receive feedback, and increase understanding about community leadership and the impact they make through use of self.

The cohort starts with a five day retreat, where you will learn:

• interpersonal skills training
• network facilitation methods
• collaboration for sustainable development
• technology training
• Dreamfish culture orientation
• work plan development

The cohort is trained and mentored by leading educators in leadership, knowledge management and international development, sustainable development and collaboration, and organization development. Your mentors include:

• Nancy White, co-author of recently released Digital Habitats, online community pioneer and technology steward in international development
• Mary Ann Huckabay, PhD, Director of Stanford Graduate School of Business Women in Management program, and former Director of Stanford GSB's Group Facilitation Training Program.
• Tiffany von Emmel, PhD, Founder of Dreamfish, innovator in areas of knowledge and sustainability, community facilitation, and use of self.

With community processes grounded in transformative learning research, we operate on the belief that adults learn and develop in relationship with peers, through self-directing learning in action-reflection cycles, and through multiple ways of knowing.  Structurally, the Dreamfish community is designed according to best practices from Open Source software community management, and community-based organization development.

Dreamfish Fellow Responsibilities

Community Leadership

• Participating in the quarterly strategic planning process for community development
• Recruiting, training, supporting volunteers to serve on service teams
• Tracking impact of community, according to success metrics, including gender equity, and poverty reduction
• Fostering effective interpersonal communication, online and in-person, among members  
• Model skillful engagement of diversity in culture, class, gender, industry, skill, generation, technical ability, and other differences
• Understanding and promoting Dreamfish guidelines, processes and policies
• Provide updates and feedback through weekly progress reports and a final end-of-fellowship report within one month
• Complete other tasks for Dreamfish as needed related to community development

Transformative Learning

• Conduct interviews of new members via in-person, chat, and Skype
• Host conference call or chat sessions to build learning community
• Coach members in furthering learning goals and contributing effectively
• Observe, learn, document and share best practices and processes 
• Host quarterly learning events for learning and sharing skills, best practices, and processes
• Connect members with opportunities in Dreamfish that meet their interests
• Help members to create working documents and templates for practices and processes
• Develop and publish content to celebrate stories of members, communicate Dreamfish culture of inclusion and empowerment, and effective ways to create a project work life.

Social Technology Stewardship

You will apply social technology to facilitate at multiple system levels:  the network level, community level, group level, and interpersonal level.  You will use of best-of-breed collaboration tools to enable members to practice: 

• Using Community Networking tools 

  

• Write a Blog post every two weeks 
• Using Chat, email and Skype for coaching members in rural low-bandwidth regions
• Engaging members with Social Media services - Facebook, Twitter, FriendFeed, Flickr and Vimeo

Successful candidates have the following characteristics

• Experience in one of the following: social media, open source software, organization development, online community, adult education, international development, user experience design
• Experience in an underserved community
• Desire to become a Dreamfish member, and further the Dreamfish mission
• Demonstrated capacity to develop and coach a team
• Highly flexible and able to creatively solve problems in a complex environment
• Strong degree of self-motivation
• Life-long learner
• Strong interpersonal skills
• Familiarity and comfort with various web applications
• Excellent writing skills
• Strong project management skills
• Interest in micro-business, alleviating poverty and empowerment
• Fluent English
• Commitment for a minimum of 10 hours/ week for 6 months

Dreamfish Fellows with the following skills find great success working in Dreamfish community leadership:
Background in building an online community, consulting, grassroots nonprofit or startup entrepreneurship
Advanced language skills in French, Spanish, Chinese, Portuguese, Russian, Urdu, Arabic, Vietnamese, or other language in a country where Dreamfish has a presence

C. Location

Because Dreamfish is a distributed community, a Fellow can serve in any country where Dreamfish members are located. We will develop a class of Fellows that can cover a range of time zones. One can choose to work from home, or serve in another country. The Fellow will be responsible for his/her travel to the San Francisco Bay Area for a five-day training.

D. 2010 Fellowship Calendar


The Fellowship is a 6 months commitment, and Fellows enter on a quarterly basis. In Summer, 2010, Dreamfish will welcome its first cohort of Dreamfish Fellows.

Summer, 2010 Dreamfish Fellows:

Dreamfish fellows to be announced
Orientation Training: June 2-6, 2010
First day: June 9, 2010
Last day no sooner than: December 15, 2010

Fall, 2010 Dreamfish Fellows
Application Deadline: August 15, 2010
Cohort capacity: 16
Orientation Training: September 8-12, 2010
First day: September 20, 2010
Last day no sooner than: March 20, 2010

E. Process

Step 1: Become a Dreamfish Member
Step 2: *Fill out Dreamfish Fellow Application
Step 3: Skype Interview
Step 4: Plan Agreement
Step 5: Final Interview
Step 6: Acceptance
Step 7: Fellowship Agreement
Step 8: Community Leadership Retreat
Step 9: Service work and weekly coaching group
Step 10: Final reflection and evaluation session

*If your school sponsors you, check with your school for any additional requirements

F. Fellowship Benefits

• 5 day Fellows retreat to orient to Dreamfish and train in community leadership practices
  
• Mentorship by leading community leadership consultants
• Each Fellow can receive a $3,000 stipend, if funded through nonprofit educational partner
  
• Further education in social entrepreneurship for global impact
• Pioneer new practices indistributed community-based organization development, creative longevity for elders, sustainability and international development, gender and human rights.
  Practice-based action research with grassroots NGOs and micro-business

G. Funding for Fellows
 

How do we  fund Fellowship?

Each Fellow is responsible to seek out funding to fund their Fellowship. The source of funding may come from their graduate school, a granting institution, friends and family.
 A Fellow can also self-fund their Fellowship.

Dreamfish is offering up to three scholarships for the Summer Fellows cohort. The fellows awarded will be an exceptional individuals, not necessarily associated with an educational institution.

For graduate  students, faculty and alumni of Fielding Graduate University: Fielding has a Dreamfish Fellows Fund to sponsor students, alumni and faculty in the Doctoral and Masters programs that are accepted as Dreamfish Fellows. Contact Katrina Rogers at krogers@fielding.edu at Fielding Institute for Social Innovation for further information about funding.

If you are in a graduate school and want your school to participate in the Fellows program, contact Marie-Anne Haour at mahaour@dreamfish.com

What does a Fellowship cost?

If you are self-funding as a Fellow, the community leadership training fee is $1850.

If you plan to seek funding, we recommend that you draw up a budget to include the following: training fee, travel to San Francisco, and $3,000 stipend for yourself.

How do I contribute to the Fellows Program?

If you wish to fund a fellow with a tax-deductible gift, please see investing in Dreamfish.

H. How to apply

Fill out a Dreamfish Fellows Application. Yay!

Last updated 599 days ago by Tiffany von Emmel