2026-2027 Fellowship Application

Economic instability and neighborhood disinvestment are closely linked to disproportionate rates of violence and premature death. This reality has persisted for generations, reflecting a broader failure to value human life equally across places and populations.

This Fellowship is a deep immersion into the poverty–violence relationship, with the aim of developing a credible roadmap to reduce violence through practical, measurable action. Fellows will analyze who is most affected, where violence concentrates, what conditions correlate with risk, and what has and has not worked in past efforts.

Fellows will create a database of all murders, shootings, violent assaults, and knifings across the U.S. and keep a running, up-to-date count that will be part of the Bergel Institute website beyond this Fellowship year. The Fellowship also includes direct engagement with community leaders, service providers, researchers, and relevant public, nonprofit, and private-sector programs to identify effective approaches and develop partnerships that can be tested across communities.

This Fellowship gives you the opportunity to identify one place in the United States and focus on ensuring it has the resources required for residents to gain economic stability and independence. The work is practical and coalition-driven. Rather than debating systems in the abstract, Fellows will begin immediately by recruiting and securing community partners, which may include healthy food manufacturers or grocery stores, health care providers, financial institutions, and local employers. Depending on the community, the Fellowship may also include the initial steps required to build a recreation center or implement apprenticeship programs in local businesses.

Fellows will use The Bergel Institute’s Poverty Action Guide as a foundation to identify the barriers keeping families in poverty and to design an implementation-ready plan. The work will focus on the conditions that most directly shape long-term stability, including employment, education, basic needs, transportation, child care, health, housing, savings, and safety. Fellows will work with leaders from each sector in the community, building partnerships among existing institutions and recruiting new providers where gaps exist.

By the end of the Fellowship, the Fellow will produce a pilot model and roadmap that can be adapted and replicated in other communities. Because this work requires coordination and follow-through, the Fellow will work closely with Bergel Institute staff throughout the Fellowship year.

During the past ten years, many in the U.S. and around the world have worried that AI and AI-related technologies will reduce the need for human labor, shrink the number of jobs, and push more people into economic instability. The Bergel Institute has a different perspective: rapid improvements in communications and access to information can expand economic opportunity and open new entryways into the mainstream economy.

This Fellowship will explore where AI can remove long-standing obstacles to stability, including translation issues on forms, limited English proficiency when searching and applying for jobs online, navigating cost-of-living differences across regions, and making informed relocation decisions by comparing pay to real-world expenses.

The Fellowship will also examine applications that expand opportunity by reducing shocks and removing barriers to stability. AI and satellite imagery may improve mapping relative to who is living in poverty so providers of aid and assistance can reach towns, villages, or households missed by traditional survey methods, helping families access support sooner and re-enter the mainstream economy faster. AI tools can also strengthen disaster relief and recovery so households are not impacted as intensely or for as long, protecting livelihoods, savings, and continuity of work and school. Given that many people in poverty around the world live and work on small farms, AI can help identify crop issues and disease and optimize production, strengthening household income. In education and skill development, new platforms can deliver quality, affordable education to remote areas, reducing geographical and transportation obstacles and expanding pathways into better-paying work.

By the end of the Fellowship, the Fellow will produce a credible roadmap for what can be built, who must be involved, what barriers to adoption exist, and what can be implemented in the near term.

Science can reshape how we live and what we believe is possible. It can also be misunderstood, oversold, or used to justify claims that go far beyond the evidence. This Fellowship asks: how do we rigorously interpret the past 100+ years of scientific work, and what, if anything, does it suggest about human potential and what is possible in our lives?

In the early 20th century, the Copenhagen Interpretation helped bring quantum mechanics into public view, and later frameworks, including chaos theory and string theory, challenged classical assumptions about how reality works. Einstein argued that quantum theory was incomplete, yet modern research has repeatedly validated core aspects of quantum physics, which now underpins many major technologies, including experimentally supported nonlocal effects. At the same time, string theory remains debated, including disputes about dimensional models and whether the theory is scientifically predictive. These debates are often extended into broader claims about consciousness and human potential, including ideas linked to Jung’s concept of the collective unconscious and shared human experience.

This Fellowship will be immersive, exploring with precision the origins and rationale behind the types of scientific theories and experimental research noted above. The goal is to produce a definitive study of these theoretical sciences that will make a unique and practical contribution to human knowledge. Further, the Fellowship will result in a blueprint for how the validated theoretical sciences can impact the human condition. The Fellow will develop and implement a strategy to effectively educate the general public on the applications of what can serve as the jumping-off point in the evolution of our species.

Acupuncture, tai chi, yoga, reiki, past life regression, and other modalities used for centuries point to a definition of the self that goes far beyond skin, bones, and organs. Yet they remain on the back burner when people in the U.S. explore health and healing, or design health care systems. Why are we not more interested in what is possible with regard to healing, or in experiencing health as more than simply the absence of disease?

The roots of acupuncture trace back more than 5,000 years. In the last 60 years, brain surgery has been done with acupuncture as the only anesthetic. Yet Western healthcare barely addresses modalities cemented in cultures around the world, even as we often trust approaches that have been around for fewer than 50 years and used by far fewer people.

Expanding our approach to health helps us arrive at answers and ask important questions. Do we exist only to the tips of our fingers, or does energy course through our bodies and beyond? Does this energy connect us in a tangible, physical manner, even if not visible to the untrained eye? This Fellowship will explore these questions and include much more than descriptions of practices that may be called alternative or complementary. It will focus on how we can finally apply the full insights of these modalities to our daily lives. Fellows will examine when and where practices began, what is practiced where, what modalities work for what health conditions, and what questions remain. The work will also explore the role of consciousness in healing, including whether it exists and, if so, whether it exists as a connective energy or a personal reservoir of thought and memories.

In communities where mentors are needed the most, young children look up to the individuals who have preceded them. These individuals understand the local realities firsthand and can offer the type of consistent encouragement that changes life trajectories. This is at the heart of the Fellowship.

Individuals born and raised in communities characterized by high levels of poverty often face challenges that have made it difficult for them to find satisfying employment that leads to generational wealth.

For younger children, the cycles of poverty start at birth, and by age seven they are often part of a cycle of academic underperformance and youth violence. Soon thereafter the lack of career-building pathways are devastating, and yet this continues generation after generation in urban, rural, and suburban neighborhoods across the U.S.

This Fellowship focuses on building the mentorship industry into a credentialed profession, an essential part of the educational system. The goal is to produce a blueprint and complete the early implementation steps needed to create full-time jobs and career pathways, while improving outcomes for children.

The Fellowship includes designing the training, certification, and licensing framework, with The Bergel Institute serving as the standards-setting and certification body. The Institute will work with the Fellow to define competencies, set requirements, approve training partners, and issue credentials to mentors and mentoring organizations beyond the initial pilot site, which will launch during the Fellowship year.