The New York City-based Acumen Fund is seeking applicants for its second group of Acumen Fund Fellows. Applications for the year-long program are due by 31 January 2007.

In an email announcement, Acumen Fund Founder and CEO Jacqueline Novogratz wrote:

While capital is a constraint to building systems to make critical goods and services accessible to the poor, an even larger constraint is people. The world needs to build an "entrepreneurial bench" of top talent with strong financial and operational skills as well as the moral imagination to build appropriate enterprises with local stakeholders.

The program begins in September 2007, and fellows will spend eight weeks in New York City in an intensive training program where they focus on business models for the poor and their own leadership – both theoretical and practical. At the end of the training, each fellow will be assigned to work with an Acumen Fund investment in Kenya, Tanzania, South Africa, India or Pakistan, and given a concrete set of deliverables for the following nine months. After these assignments, fellows return to New York for a month to share experiences, exchange lessons learned, and focus on potential job opportunities.

The Acumen Fund seeks "individuals with exceptional business skills, proven international interests and a great ability to work with people." They add that fellows must "have the talent to do almost anything in their careers, and the vision to see themselves making significant change to challenging social problems." For more information and to apply, see the Acumen Fund Web site (and its many PDF files).

Echoing Green, the New York City-based nonprofit with a mission to spark social change by identifying and supporting exceptional emerging leaders and the organizations they launch, has announced its 2006 group of fellows. The 12 individuals or teams, selected from 800 individuals from 75 different countries will address an array of pressing social problems and pursue innovative strategies for positive social change including the first school in Africa with a comprehensive focus on developing future African leadership; clean technology projects in rural Latin America; and a city-wide youth-led development plan for Baltimore, Maryland.

See the Echoing Green site to Meet the 2006 Fellows.

Thanks to Heather Novak for the suggestion.