---
title: Charitology Fellowship
group: People and education
order: 2
summary: Plan public research projects, a cohort curriculum, milestones, supervision and transparent work-related review discussions.
status: live
statusNote: Live local fellowship-planning software is available. It recruits or selects no people, offers no stipend and grants no fellowship, employment or credential.
conditions: [missing-profession]
firstMilestone: A host institution, a legal home and published selection criteria in place for a pilot cohort of three fellows.
help:
  - If your university, research group or nonprofit could host fellows, open an issue labeled program.
  - Propose a fellowship project tied to one of the Open Problems.
  - Suggest how fellows should be chosen so the program reaches people outside the usual institutions.
related: [/open-problems/, /open-problems/the-profession-question/, /programs/question-bounties/, /programs/certified-charitologist/]
---

## Use the operational planning software

Use the [fellowship desk](#partner-workspace-charitology-fellowship) to plan research projects, facilitated learning, supervision and deliverables. Review public work through project codes and explicit criteria. Keep private applicant information and sensitive personal attributes out of the notebook. The software makes no individual selection or eligibility decision.

The workspace includes separate institutional-readiness records. Those records track what responsible people still need to establish; they do not grant approval or verify a legal, funded program. The longer-term charter below remains an institutional proposal.

Save each form, inspect the generated kit and export a backup. Your records stay in this browser. Imports are validated, destructive changes offer undo and newer work from another tab is protected. Fictional examples contain no real commitments, participants or results.

## 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](/diagnosis/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.