What Happened: During fall 2022, the proposed program design for Mountaintop included providing Fellows with pay in line with United Nations pay scales for each country, and raising most of the fellowship costs philanthropically. This financial model assumed:

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1. NGO and social ventures would be unwilling or unable to contribute meaningfully to the financial model, making it more important to focus on philanthropic fundraising;

2. Paying in line with the United Nations pay scales would be necessary to attract outstanding candidates.

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In fact, through dozens of conversations with peer organizations, emerging leaders around the world, and potential host organizations, it became clear that neither of these assumptions were correct. Many host organizations, even small to midsized NGOs in lower-income countries in sub-Saharan Africa, were willing to pay a fee equal to what they would already be paying early career employees to host a full-time Mountaintop Fellow because of Mountaintop's ability to recruit top locally-rooted talent and to provide hosts with professional development. And many outstanding young people shared that the Mountaintop Fellowship's benefits extended much beyond the stipend to include the value of a high impact structured opportunity to serve their home community, training at Harvard, mentorship, peer relationships, and ongoing alumni support.

 

Further, outstanding young people generally thought the United Nations pay scales actually provided several multiples more compensation than the cost of living in their community, and while of course they would be happy to make more money, many did not think this was even close to necessary and given limited resources, that money could be spent on additional fellowship benefits. Finally, many entrepreneurs from peer nonprofits advised time and again to make the financial model as sustainable as possible, and that ensuring a large portion of the budget comes from earned revenue was the best way to do this.

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How Mountaintop Responded: Mountaintop changed its financial model to require that hosts pay a fee to host a Fellow equal to whatever they pay equally qualified employees at their host site. By setting the price at this rate, hosts are not overburdened to pay more than what they already pay for employees, there are no pay discrepancies between Fellows and host staff that might otherwise create cultural problems, and the host is in a much better position to hire the Fellow full time after the fellowship if they are already getting paid in line with their pay scale, strengthening sustainability. While improving the programmatic experience, this financial model also has the dual benefit of being much more financially sustainable, dramatically reducing the need for philanthropy each year. With the new model, philanthropy is solely required for covering the cost of the fellowship training and enrichment, recruitment/selection, and operations, and none is needed to pay the Fellow stipends.

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Mountaintop's Learning and Commitment: Mountaintop has learned that no matter how intuitive, all programmatic assumptions must be tested through direct feedback from the people who are most proximate to the work. Mountaintop commits to continuing to have its financial model driven by the twin principles of proximity and sustainability.