Dial Fellowship

At Emerson Collective, we look continuously for breakthroughs that can create new avenues of opportunity for individuals, families, and communities. But we also know that breakthroughs are only the beginning. If these breakthroughs are to spark lasting change, new stories must be told that capture the public’s imagination and lay a foundation for progress.

That’s why we built a fellowship program that provides remarkable leaders with new communications tools and resources to tell the stories of their breakthroughs, captivate new audiences, shape important public conversations, and ultimately, extend the reach and impact of their work.

While Dial Fellows are pursuing a wide range of topics, they each share a common vision of a more just world, where opportunity is more equally distributed.

The program is designed to elevate the work and ideas of Fellows; connect them to a diverse fellowship community; and celebrate Fellows as breakthrough leaders. As a result, we hope Dial Fellows will be able to tell their stories in more powerful and relatable ways, sparking momentum for their missions.

Fellows are selected through an invitation-only application process. Each class of Fellows is designed to reflect Emerson Collective’s wide-ranging priorities. Dial Fellows are social entrepreneurs, scientists, lawyers, activists, and inventors with a track record of exceptional achievement, an important big breakthrough driving their work, and an ambitious vision to grow their impact.

The Dial was an American journal founded in 1840 by Ralph Waldo Emerson and other Transcendentalists. Originally edited by the journalist Margaret Fuller, The Dial, which was named for a sundial, was created to shine a light on the best contemporary ideas of the day. Here’s how the journal described its own ambition:

“The pages of this Journal will be filled by contributors, who possess little in common but the love of intellectual freedom, and the hope of social progress; who are united by sympathy of spirit, not by agreement in speculation; whose hearts are more in the future than in the past; and who trust the living soul rather than the dead letter.”

In this same spirit, we hope the Dial Fellowship brings together extraordinary leaders from vastly different backgrounds and fields of work, united by a pursuit of social progress, with hearts more in the future than the past.