The Hart Fellowship

The Hart Fellowship is a one-year postgraduate fellowship which provides recent Duke graduates the opportunity to engage deeply and meaningfully with a community partner on a topic of social, political, or humanitarian importance. This year of research, action, and reflection is a container in which recent graduates can practice the art of ethical leadership in public life through hands-on work with a community on a particular issue. Throughout the year, Hart Fellows will provide direct service to a community through partnership with a local or grassroots organization while also creating and executing a community-based, participatory research project in collaboration with their host community.

Hart Fellows have worked with organizations on topics of climate justice, educational equity, healthcare access, childhood adversity, and much more. The Fellowship year is stretching and transformative, encouraging Fellows to invest deeply in their communities both in and outside of regular work hours. Hart Fellows allow themselves to be changed by their work, exhibiting both research curiosity and cultural humility. At the end of the Fellowship year, most participants report that they have been impacted by their community organization at least as much, if not more, than they have made an impact.

Beginning in 1995, the first Hart Fellows traveled to Rwanda and Bosnia with Save the Children, working with the children of genocide victims and perpetrators, to provide for the children’s physical and emotional needs. Apart from supporting an organization that gave food, shelter, and education to children in adversity, the Hart Fellows also provided witness and friendship to those suffering the indignities of war. Through this work, the Fellows themselves were transformed, inspired to lives of public service and care for communities in need.

Hart Fellows today partner with organizations both domestically and abroad to engage in hands-on work, produce community-based research projects of tangible benefit to the communities they serve, and engage in structured, critical reflection about their work throughout. They are paired with experienced mentors within their host organizations, and gain direct experience working on critical issues such as forced migration, HIV/AIDS, and youth-focused poverty alleviation. Fellows help to build organizational capacity, write grants, and document programs. Since its inception in 1995, 121 Hart Fellows have served community partner organizations in over 40 countries across six continents.

The Hart Fellowship is designed to build Fellows’ capacity for leadership outside of conventional professional knowledge. Working with community partners to address systemic issues in the field, Hart Fellows face obstacles in social attitudes and political will, and often must grapple with profound differences in values. They engage in the practice of critical reflection to analyze the implications of larger patterns and dynamics within sociopolitical systems, as well as to better understand their own skills, interests and leadership capacities. Their insights and observations form the foundation of the Hart Fellowship writing program, which prepares Fellows to develop their perspectives about the complexities of their work, and to communicate what they are learning to a public audience.

The Hart Fellowship is supported by a generous gift from the Muroff Fund.