Soulever Foundation Fellowship

The Soulever Foundation Fellowship develops emerging professionals by giving FAMU students meaningful, supervised opportunities to apply what they are learning in the classroom to real institutional work.

Soulever began in the band room, but its obligation to lift students does not end there.

Future professionals. Period.

The Fellowship is not solely a Soulever employee pipeline. Soulever is the incubator, not the required destination. If a Fellow later works at Soulever, that's a success. If a Fellow launches somewhere else, that's a success too.

There is no Marching Band requirement and no music-major requirement. The Fellowship can serve FAMU students across disciplines whenever meaningful work, qualified supervision, and an appropriate placement all exist together.

Initial Fellowship lanes may include:

Additional disciplines may be added later (including areas such as engineering, architecture, construction management, health, education, and business) whenever Soulever can provide meaningful professional work and qualified supervision.

No fake internship. No coffee-and-copy-machine fellowship.

Every placement is built around:

• Substantive professional work
• A defined role and project
• Clear learning objectives
• A qualified supervisor or mentor
• Appropriate access controls
• Regular feedback
• A tangible work product or portfolio outcome
• A final evaluation

A Fellow is a developing professional, not automatically the professional of record. Soulever does not place sole responsibility for licensed, regulated, fiduciary, or high-risk professional work on a student Fellow.

Qualified does not equal guaranteed placement. If there is no meaningful project or qualified supervisor ready, Soulever waits rather than create a placement just to fill a seat.

A Fellow should leave able to say more than “I interned at a nonprofit.” The program is built to produce experience a student can explain, demonstrate, and carry into the next room: “I helped build something.”

• Communications Fellow: real campaign, content, and storytelling work
• Finance Fellow: real supervised budgeting, reporting, and nonprofit-finance work
• Music & Education Fellow: real educational and program development
• Technology Fellow: a real system or digital project
• Research Fellow: real analysis and impact work

Soulever doesn't just help launch people. We remember where they went.

With a Fellow's permission, the Soulever Fellow Legacy & Launch Archive may one day preserve their FAMU story, their Fellowship project, their graduation and degree, and the professional path that followed, with optional touchpoints at future milestone years. Public participation in the archive is always opt-in.

For questions about the Fellowship, contact:

scholarships@souleverfoundation.org