The Earth Leadership Program was founded to better enable the world’s leading scientific researchers to accelerate transformations to sustainability. With our growing climate emergency, biodiversity crisis, and other signs of our complex connections with the environment like the COVID-19 epidemic, it is clear that the mission of the program is more relevant than ever.
However, our primary concern must be the health and safety of our current North America cohort, a collection of some of the brightest minds in their fields from across the US, Mexico and Canada. After careful consideration and out of an abundance of caution with regard to the evolving COVID-19 situation, the executive team of the Earth Leadership Program has decided to postpone activities of the 2021 North America Cohort for a period of one year to ensure a comfortable and safe environment for our in-person-based transdisciplinary training program.
This was a difficult decision, as the team is eager to get to work with our stellar cohort of 22 sustainability scientists. We believe, however, that our collective leadership training has critical in-person aspects, and that pausing our program to allow our North America cohort to gather safely next year is well-worth the delay.
We will strategically use the next year to perform a deeper analysis of the program’s impact, both historical and aspirational, and ensure we optimize our resources and programming for our diverse fellows of the 2021 (now 2022) cohort.
Because of this delay in our 2022 cohort training, we will not be recruiting and selecting a new cohort of fellows this year. Please look for an announcement in spring 2022 for applications for the 2023 cohort.
Until then, keep an eye on this space for news and collaborations from our network of sustainability leaders. As with you all, we eagerly await the new possibilities of a post-COVID future.
All the best,
Sharon Collinge
Executive Director, Earth Leadership Program
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