Fellows Program

The Center for Collaborative Conservation’s Fellows Program provides funding and training to students, faculty, and practitioners who use a collaborative approach to help communities improve their livelihoods and achieve conservation goals. Our growing network of Fellows stays connected to the CCC and their cohort during and after the fellowship for lifelong friendship and learning. For a comprehensive view of our program, check out our CCC Fellows Program 10-year review: Assessment of impacts.

How to become a Fellow

We expect to release our next Fellows Program request-for-proposals around August 2022.

Please subscribe to our newsletter to learn when that RFP becomes available. If you are interested in seeing what Program application materials look like, you can find an example Fellows application here as well as Cohort 12’s evaluation criteria here.

When the next Cohort opens, we are seeking projects that use collaboration to address conservation and livelihood issues and include direct involvement by communities or stakeholders that have an interest in the outcomes of this work.

We encourage applications with an emphasis on at least one of the four following criteria:

Projects led by individuals who identify as belonging to an underrepresented or marginalized group.
Projects focused on underserved or marginalized communities, and tribal and ancestral lands.
Projects centered on private land issues.
International projects that focus on rangelands.

Current Fellows

Cohort 10

$48,000 awarded 6 Fellows working on 4 projects focused on human-carnivore relationships. Meet the Fellows and read about the projects here.

Cohort 11

$42,300 awarded to 7 Fellows working on 3 projects in Colorado, Brazil, and Tanzania. Meet the Fellows and read about the projects here.

Fellows Training

Our Fellows Program 10-year Review describes how the program trains individuals in collaborative conservation, and how, in the words of one CCC Fellows, ”there is pedagogy and evidence-based best practices for effective collaboration.” To access training materials we have used over the years, see our “how to” resources.

Fellows Products

CCC Fellows have produced over 150 theses, peer-reviewed journal articles, reports, videos and more that provide insight into collaborative conservation general and specific efforts across the globe. Check out the full list here.

Fellows Interactive Directory

Nearly 150 CCC Fellows have worked in 27 countries and 17 Native American nations. See who has done what where by clicking on this interactive map.

Fellows Testimony

95% of CCC Fellows Program alumni reported that their fellow’s project had been useful to them professionally.

96% reported that the Fellows Program had increased the collaborative nature of their project.

80% indicated that both their Fellow’s project and the Fellows Program had improved their ability to work with a diversity of people.

100% indicated that they had worked across cultural, disciplinary, administrative, or linguistic boundaries in their Fellows’ project.

“Being part of the CCC Fellows community was a defining moment in my professional development… Thank you!”

“I feel that the CCC played a really essential role in shaping me as a conservationist.”

“As a graduate fellow who now works in conservation, having a much better grasp on the idea of collaborative conservation has been really important in the way that I now view the world.”

“I never thought of collaboration as something that was teachable because it feels amorphous and ambiguous. The Fellow Program helped me see that there is pedagogy and evidence-based best practices for effective collaboration.”