Soros Equality Fellowship

Open Society-U.S.’s Soros Equality Fellowship seeks to support emerging midcareer professionals whom we believe will become long-term innovative leaders impacting racial justice.

The Soros Equality Fellowship seeks to support individual leaders influencing and transforming the racial justice field. We understand the unique role an individual can play in rejecting old paradigms and presenting a new vision for the United States we hope to become. We invite applicants to be bold, innovative, and audacious in their submissions. The aim of the Fellowship is to be flexible and open—a space to incubate new ideas, promote risk-taking, and develop different ways of thinking that challenge and expand our existing assumptions. A successful project should identify a challenge and propose a critical intervention that will meaningfully address the systems that reinforce inequities and discrimination in the United States.

Over the last year, Open Society Foundations has affirmed our long history supporting racial justice efforts through a new, significant financial and strategic commitment to the field with the goal of building long-term power in communities of color. Through this Fellowship, Open Society aims to provide a network of leaders, representing the diversity of experiences, with the resources to address racial inequality and the space they need to imagine a more equitable future.

We are living in unprecedented times in the United States, where the issues of inequality have created a new racial reckoning to address issues of injustice. As such, we believe this year’s cohort should consider their project within the current social and political moment. We know toxic narratives, racialized anxiety, economic insecurity, and an ongoing health pandemic have reinforced divisions and the systems that perpetuate inequities. It is in this context that we ask applicants to place their project and explain how and why their project is necessary to counter these threats and move toward a more inclusive multiracial democracy.

Visit the Open Society Foundation’s website for eligibility criteria, application guidelines, and FAQs.