Summary

Coro Fellows in Public Affairs are bright, self-motivated individuals from varying backgrounds. They are selected through a highly competitive national process; Pittsburgh hosts 15 of those Fellows each year. They deal with complex issues, solve challenging problems and complete high-level projects.  Using each other as resources, Fellows are able to create a lasting impact in any situation.  For more information on the Fellows Program itself, click here. 

Meet the 2007-2008 class!

A critical part of Coro’s experiential fellowship program is a series of  field placements in government agencies, nonprofits, businesses, labor unions, media organizations, educational institutions and electoral campaigns.   Typically, Fellows experience the government placement in teams of two.

Effective leadership requires understanding of how an organization operates, relates to other sectors and interfaces with various constituencies.  Placements allow Fellows to explore:

• Leadership and decision-making
• Technology and innovation
• Public/private partnerships and government regulations
• Administrative operations

Projects

Coro encourages partner organizations to identify project work for the Fellow to complete during the field placement. Projects provide an opportunity for Fellows to produce a tangible product for their host.  Former partner organizations have found the following types of projects highly successful and cost-effective:

• Projects that are significant or important but not urgent and thus are often difficult to allocate staff resources to undertake
• Conceptual issues or challenges for the host – the Fellow can generate ideas about how to proceed based on the host’s needs
• Procedural issues or processes that need to be better defined or examined with a fresh and critical eye towards improvement

Please look at sample projects** for a better idea of what fellows have accomplished.  Nonprofit   Business

**Please note that these project descriptions were not written by the placement organizations, but were conceptualizations of the projects from the fellows themselves.

Benefits to Partner Organizations

The most basic benefits to hosting a Coro Fellow include:

• placement of a highly capable, college-educated individual who has been through a national, rigorous selection process
• capacity to get projects accomplished that are currently unstaffed
• opening your organization to an objective perspective, along with the perspective of youth

Partner organizations will benefit when the Fellows are allowed access to managers and decision-makers throughout the agency.  They will set up their own informational interviews and become significantly informed about your agency in a short period of time, thus creating informed, valuable and lasting project outcomes. Furthermore, fellows are experts at generating relationships and collaborations with other organizations, and Coro training focuses them on finding and keeping these relationships for your organization.  

Current and Former Partner Organizations

There are many companies and organizations that have hosted Coro Fellows in Public Affairs.

Schedule

If you are interested in hosting a fellow, please fill out the Application For Placement, attached to the packet for each placement.  If you are not sure if you are interested, please fax back the Host Response form, and we will follow-up with you.

Other schedule information:  Generally, during the placement period, Fellows are expected to report to their placements Monday through Thursday, weekends and/or evenings as pre-arranged. Fellows attend required training seminars on Tuesday evenings starting at 6:00 p.m. and Fridays (all day) at Coro's Southside office.

Evaluation

The partner organization and Coro Staff will work together to evaluate the performance of the fellow and the placement process using a brief form. After an organization is selected, Coro Staff will assist the organization with preparing this evaluation before the placement starts and completing it when the placement ends. We have found that the results you can expect from your fellow are of significantly higher quality if we institute an evaluative system that the fellow is aware of before the placement begins.

Background Information

The Coro Fellows Program in Public Affairs is committed to strengthening the quality of leadership.  The program conducts training for up to 68 participants annually in five centers across the country: Pittsburgh, New York, St. Louis, San Francisco and Los Angeles. Coro Fellows learn about the real world in the real world—by actively questioning, interacting with diverse constituents, examining resources and inventing solutions to the problems faced by their communities. 

Coro’s branch in Pittsburgh was established in 1999 to educate and train ethical and effective leaders. In addition to program staff, Coro relies on partner organizations and community leaders to fulfill its mission by playing two key roles:

•            Create projects for fellows to complete at partner organization sites

•            Serve as interviewee for group interviews

Contact

For more information, or to express interest in hosting a Coro Fellow in Public Affairs, please contact:

Maggie Sullivan

Ph: 412-258-2671

Fx: 412-201-0672

msullivan@coro.org