Henry Wallace Fellowship Program

Applications for the 2024 Henry Wallace Fellowship Program are now closed. Applications for the 2025 program will open by March, 2025 – please check back then for more information.

This program is a transformation of IPS’s Next Leaders Interns program, and is named after Henry A. Wallace, a key architect of the New Deal as FDR’s Vice President, and Secretary of Agriculture and Commerce. This new Program honors Henry Wallace’s commitment to fighting fascism, fighting against corporate capture of democracy, fighting militarism, and fighting against racism.

To sustain dynamic movements for peace, justice, and the environment, we need to galvanize those most impacted by the broken system: young people. As a paid 10-week program, the Henry Wallace Fellowship Program offers young activists training in public scholarship – the connection between policy research, advocacy, and grassroots activism. Through its workshop and events series and individualized mentorship, the Henry Wallace Fellowship looks to sharpen young scholar-activists’ voices and hone their skills.

The program will feature workshops with leading strategic thinkers that will share lessons from innovative fights taking on corporate power and resist it. In addition to public scholarship skills, the workshops will include the history of successful movements and lessons to be learned from both victories and defeats.

The program will culminate in a two-day strategic gathering. In addition to hands-on experience, each cohort will leave the program with a more nuanced understanding of environmental, racial, economic, gender, and peace justice.

THE EXPERIENCE

Here’s a little bit more about how the program works. It’s broken into five parts:

1. Workshop and Events Series – We’ve prepared a curriculum of weekly workshops and events geared toward the following:
   • Building community within your cohort
   • Sparking intergenerational dialogue to brainstorm around new pressure points in the policy world
   • Sharing skills needed to become a successful public scholar
   • Providing a crash course on the frameworks, history, and current events of the progressive movement and policy sphere

   In addition to strengthened public scholarship skills, each cohort will leave the program with a more nuanced understanding of environmental, racial, economic, gender, and peace justice. Past workshops have included Op-ed Writing, Public Speaking, Racial Justice, Power-Mapping and the Modern-Day Labor Movement, and Restorative Justice.

2. Mentorship – Each participant will get hands-on experience by working on one of our projects and will receive individualized mentorship and training from one of our IPS public scholars. Typical responsibilities include research, writing, shadowing on events with core allies, and helping us with our social media presence. All of our interns also have the opportunity to work with our skilled editors and write for our in-house publications. Our interns work within one of the following core areas, and specific Fellowship descriptions can be found further down this page.
   • Economic and Racial Justice: Combating inequality means both lifting up and building power, and breaking up concentration of wealth and power That’s why we work at the intersection of economic and racial justice through projects designed to build leadership and self-empowerment of black workers, immigrant workers, and low-wage workers, youth and families affected by incarceration, along with projects aiming to reverse the rules that criminalize poor people of color, and projects fighting to ensure that the wealthy and Wall Street corporations pay their fair share of taxes.
   • Climate Justice: In order to avert a climate catastrophe, we must transition away from fossil fuels to a clean energy economy. On both a domestic and a global level, climate change hurts poor people and communities of color first and worst, so we seek solutions that center economic and racial justice as critical components of addressing climate change.
   • Fundraising, Development and Administration:Interested in the nonprofit sector, or starting your own nonprofit someday? Fundraising is critical to the success and long term health of every nonprofit organization. A fundraising, development or operations internship is a great opportunity to see how a fundraising office works, event outreach strategy, donor cultivation, and organizational operations.
   • Peace and Foreign Policy: To build peace, we must dislodge the economic and political foundations of war. IPS believes that a just foreign policy is based on human rights, international law, and diplomacy over military intervention.
3. Intergenerational Dialogue – A centerpiece of our definition of public scholarship is that we work on ideas with movement allies. Through the Henry Wallace Fellowship Program you’ll not only get plugged into the larger progressive network, but you’ll also be exposed to best practices of coalition building, grassroots activism, and organizing.
4. Coaching and Career Development – We want to see our fellows find lasting careers in social change. Each fellow will receive career coaching during the program and access to a growing Henry Wallace Fellows network for years to come.
5. Symposium – A two-day strategic gathering during the summer with key IPS allies offering lessons from successful campaigns.

COMPENSATION AND ACADEMIC CREDIT

We offer an hourly wage of $17.50 to offset the cost of working with IPS while you help us build the future of the progressive movement.

IPS firmly believes that financial barriers shouldn’t exclude people from internship opportunities, and we are grateful to our donors who have made it possible to ensure this internship is paid. However, we strongly encourage applicants to find resources through their schools and other scholarships if they have the ability to do so. Many schools offer assistance for summer internship programs, and we ask that all applicants explore those options first in order to allow us to accept a greater number of interns that do not have access to those resources.

Interns may also receive academic credit, and IPS is happy to assist interns in filling out any requisite forms to help with the credit process.

APPLICATION INFORMATION AND TIMELINE

Applications for the summer 2025 Henry Wallace Fellowship Program will open in March, 2025. Please check back then for more information on applying.