What it is
The Charitology Fellowship would pay people to spend a year working full-time on the questions the field most needs answered. Fellows might be early-career researchers, experienced nonprofit staff, data journalists or people from the communities where much charitable money is spent. Each fellow would take on one piece of work: an open problem, a replication, a set of case studies or a new public dataset.
How it works
Fellows would be chosen through an open call with published criteria, and they would work in small cohorts that share drafts in public. Each fellowship would be hosted by a university, research group or nonprofit that provides supervision and a place to work. Every output would be published openly, and each project would be scoped to end in something others can use, such as a dataset, a method or a reviewed result.
The stipend would be enough to live on. A fellowship that only people with savings can afford would narrow the field it is trying to grow.
Why it matters for the system
The Missing Profession is partly a matter of paid time. The hardest questions in giving fall between disciplines, causes and funders, so they are rarely anyone’s job. Volunteers and prizes help. Charitology’s working assumption is that steady progress also needs people who can stay with one question for a long stretch. A fellowship would give the field those people, and its alumni would become the field’s first practitioners, reviewers and teachers.
Risks and limits
A small program can fund only a few people, and selection can favor applicants who already have credentials and connections. The open call would be advertised beyond the usual institutions, and the criteria would weigh lived experience of the problems alongside academic training. Until partners, funding and a proper legal and governance setup are in place, the program accepts no money.
What success looks like
Within five years of the first cohort, fellows have published work on at least five open problems, and most alumni still work on how generosity is aimed.