California Climate Leaders Fellowship
The California Climate Leaders Fellowship (CCLF) at the Center for Community Investment is a year-long, intensive, hands-on transformational program designed to resource equity-focused climate leaders with the community investment, systems thinking, and adaptive leadership skills to meet local climate resilience needs—and to meaningfully advance the State’s movement for climate resilience so that it can more quickly and equitably achieve results for the people of California.
Learn more about eligibility and access the application here.
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. CCLF will bring together sixteen climate leaders from across California and from a variety of sectors (climate resilience, nonprofits, local government, finance, philanthropy, etc.) to build the skills, knowledge, and relationships to take their climate resilience efforts to the next level. By deploying CCI’s Capital Absorption Framework, developing their strengths as leaders, sharing their collective knowledge and experiences, and embedding racial equity across their work, Fellows—and their communities—will experience transformative impacts.
About the Program
Over twelve months, CCLF will include five in-person multi-day seminars, seven individual coaching sessions, five virtual small group coaching sessions, and two webinars. Fellows will:
Use the Capital Absorption Framework to create and activate a robust pipeline of investable, high-impact opportunities that address local climate resilience priorities, including infrastructure
Apply systems thinking to thrive as climate leaders and inspire and facilitate powerful collaborations in alignment with racial equity priorities
Design strategies and take action on urgent climate resilience and equity issues within their communities, with a particular attention to scale, systems change, and community leadership
Build critical self-awareness and mindsets needed to inspire and facilitate powerful collaborations
Learn about financial tools to achieve greater scale and impact
Join an active and racially diverse network of committed, mutually supportive leaders working toward similar goals.
The Capital Absorption Framework
CCI’s Capital Absorption Framework is an approach that communities can use to organize capital for what matters most to them, including resources for climate resilience. 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 toward achieving their goals at scale and building more effective community investment systems so that they can more easily and efficiently accomplish those goals.
