California Climate Leaders Fellowship Application

The California Climate Leaders Fellowship (CCLF) at the Center for Community Investment is an intensive, hands-on program designed to equip leaders with the adaptive leadership knowledge and skills needed to build lasting climate security frameworks in communities and to meaningfully advance the State’s movement for climate resilience so it can more quickly and equitably achieve results for the people of California. CCLF is designed to be an ecosystem program that convenes leaders from different sectors to learn, work, and build together. We are looking for leaders with a systems orientation who are ready not only to lead in their communities but also to collaborate with others across the State and across sector boundaries to drive the change that will produce equitable climate results.

Addressing the challenges created by climate change—especially in the BIPOC, immigrant, and rural California communities that struggle to get their fair share of resources despite their vulnerability to the impacts of climate change—requires not just advocacy, but also investment and system change.

CCI’s Capital Absorption Framework is an approach that communities can use to organize capital for whatever matters most to them: climate resilience infrastructure, shared ownership of community assets, the production and preservation of affordable housing, and much more. By articulating a shared priority, creating and executing an investable pipeline of projects, and improving their enabling environment (the context in which investment takes place), communities can move towards achieving their goals at scale and building more effective community investment systems so they can more easily and efficiently accomplish those goals.