PLACES Fellowship

Applications for TFN’s 2027 PLACES Cohort coming soon!

Lift the courageous leadership that our sector needs!

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TFN’s PLACES Fellowship, which stands for Professionals Learning About Community, Equity and Sustainability, is an eight-month transformational learning journey for individuals working in philanthropy or a grantmaking organization, who are dedicated to supporting historically marginalized and racialized communities most impacted by unjust policies and oppressive systems.   

The program is designed to support grantmakers in embedding the values of racial equity and justice into their work and applying learned skills, knowledge and practices into their grantmaking and community engagement efforts. In addition, PLACES fosters culturally integrated spaces where fellows are encouraged to lean into their individual values, purpose and identities, which will guide and inform their role as leaders.   

PLACES uses facilitated, experiential and peer learning, 1:1 coaching, self and group reflections to help leaders understand how systemic racism, colonialism and other systems of oppression are impacting marginalized communities. PLACES fellows explore real-time issues like displacement and economic divestment, environmental injustice, health disparities, mass incarceration, immigration criminalization and more — asking difficult questions and reaching for uncomfortable truths. 

Regardless of their grantmaking portfolios, PLACES fellows are equipped with the tools needed to understand, challenge and dismantle systemic inequities, and then translate that learning into direct action and sustainable impact. 

Our vision is that by cultivating and connecting a diverse collective of leaders committed to racial equity and social justice, PLACES will benefit not only these individual leaders, but will deeply impact their organizations, the field of philanthropy and, most importantly, the communities they serve.

By the end of their 8 month-long fellowship program, PLACES fellows will have: 

• Reimagined philanthropy’s role in the movement to advance racial equity and justice   

• Learned directly from place-based community organizing, culture and movement leaders, from grassroots to philanthropy  

• Gained frameworks, tools and practices that translate equity values into direct action, and ways to drive impact within their organization, the field of philanthropy and beyond  

• Understood how historic, systemic oppression continues to impact communities today and learn lessons from social justice movements  

• Leaned into their individual values, purpose and identities to guide and inform their role as a leader

• Challenged biases and proximity to power to dismantle barriers for communities to access resources and engage with philanthropy 

In addition to the PLACES curriculum, fellows learn from the people and places we visit. Our fellowship cohort, selected annually from a highly competitive pool of applicants, embarks on 8-month long journey that includes four site visits to communities across the U.S. and Canada. Site visit locations vary each year. To read more about our Fellows’ experiences on the road, check out our Going PLACES blog series. 

The PLACES Fellowship concludes with a capstone presentation and graduation — but that rarely marks the end of the PLACES experience. As any PLACES alum will tell you, the deep bonds and professional connections forged by the fellows extend well beyond the end of their cohort year. 

For over 15 years, PLACES has welcomed more than 200 fellows to participate in an 8-month long transformational leadership experience. Our alums hail from all corners of the United States and Canada, representing national, regional, local foundations and grantmaking intermediaries.  

At the end of their cohort year, PLACES fellows are welcomed into the robust and highly engaged PLACES Alum Network, where they have access to several community building, networking and continued leadership development opportunities, which are informed by alums and designed according to their leadership needs. For a detailed list of our offerings and directory of alums, please visit our PLACES Alums page. 

For the 10th anniversary of TFN’s PLACES Fellowship, we worked with two award-winning journalists to help capture the stories shared and the lessons learned through the PLACES Fellowship. The result is our PLACES Impact Stories project, which includes profiles written by WLRN social justice reporter Nadege Green and videos created by documentary filmmaker Oscar Corral. View the full project here.