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Minderoo For-Purpose Fellowship
Minderoo Foundation
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What you’re good at. What you care about. Now add a paid Fellowship, a curious crew and a backstage pass to how change happens. Sound like your kind of adventure?
Why us?
Help us drive impact in:
The opportunity:
Minderoo Foundation is an Australian philanthropy committed to building a bright future where people, communities and the environment we depend on can thrive. Meaningful and lasting change takes talented people with the skills, determination and imagination to turn ambition into action.
Why you might love this opp:
🔭 The big picture: Minderoo backs people and organisations closest to the challenges it seeks to solve. Its partners are protecting oceans, driving Indigenous-led change, tackling modern slavery and championing the critical early years - all part of a diverse for-purpose sector working towards a better future. This Fellowship creates a new path into that work: learning alongside those partners, contributing to their missions and discovering where your skills can make the greatest contribution.
🧭 Your path into purpose: Across Australia, charities, foundations, community organisations and social enterprises are working to protect the environment, strengthen communities and tackle inequality. Change on this scale takes many organisations pulling different levers. Research can inform advocacy. Community insight can shape new solutions. Funding and technology can help effective approaches reach more people. There’s no single pathway into this work, and careers emerge across a wide range of causes, skills and experiences. This Fellowship gives you a wide-angle view, practical learning and an inside look at how purpose-driven organisations create change.
🥜 In a nutshell: A paid, fixed-term Fellowship, employed and supported by Minderoo Foundation, while spending most of your time embedded within partner host organisations. A series of placements (approx. six months each) providing you with a bird’s-eye view of how change happens in different settings. Mentoring, meetups and cohort activities will help you build skills and reflect along the way. And you’ll have fellow adventurers to compare notes with, grow alongside and keep calling long after the Fellowship ends. Tl;dr: If you’re completing study, a grad on the lookout, early on the journey or exploring a career in impact, this is a unique opportunity to explore where your skills fit while building connections that carry ideas and know-how across the sector.
📅 Your week: You could be digging through research to uncover insights that help a team understand complex challenges,, helping run a community consultation, supporting an impact evaluation or wrangling event logistics. You’ll sit in on team meetings, tag along to events and training, grab coffees with people doing interesting work and hear the conversations behind how change actually happens. Some tasks will play to your strengths; others will have you asking a teammate to show you the ropes. Through cohort learning, catch-ups and support, you’ll start connecting dots: what you’re learning, where you’re adding value and what’s lighting you up (plus what you’ll finish out of sheer professionalism). Across two years, those discoveries will help you see what your future in social impact could look like.
🕶️ Your style: You'll bring your own perspective to the cohort, along with a genuine curiosity about the different ways others make change happen. Maybe your open tabs have turned your browser into a small research institute. Maybe you're the person rallying volunteers, finding a smarter way to run an event or connecting people around a good idea. There's curiosity behind how you work. You listen, find your contribution and aren't afraid to give something a go. You're comfortable starting before you have all the answers, learning from feedback and building confidence through experience.
💡 What you bring: There’s no single way in, bring your own thing. Content creator with climate change on the brain? AI automation nerd with a heart for health? The friend planning road trips around community gardens, themed Spotify playlists and interesting people? Fundraiser, organiser, numbers lover, policy nerd, researcher, business builder or natural rally-er? Something else? We want to hear from you. Your skills might come from work, study, community, campaigns or a side project that grew legs. Maybe you’re a commercial thinker, a creative problem-solver or just someone who likes making things happen. Bring those skills, your curiosity and the judgement to know when to have a go and when to ask for a steer. Come with a passion, a question, or both.
📍 What’s included: A full-time, paid, fixed-term Fellowship, with a proposed term of 8 February 2027 to 15 December 2028. Experience across partner host organisations through a series of approximately six-month placements. Structured learning and development, mentoring, cohort activities and reflection. We expect to offer up to eight places across Perth and Sydney. You’ll be employed by Minderoo Foundation, with working hours and arrangements shaped by each host. Full permanent Australian working rights required.
What's involved:
🧭 Where you’ll go: Think larger non-profits and industry organisations with specialist teams, through to inventive smaller organisations or social enterprises where the person pitching an idea might also be setting up the event. Through these experiences, you’ll learn to read the room, find your fit and contribute at different speeds, with different resources.
🎒 What travels with you: Minderoo’s values: courage to try, humility to listen, integrity in how you follow through and genuine care for the people alongside you. You’ll try things, put feedback to work and collect clues to carry into your next chapter: a problem you helped untangle, a contribution you can point to, a skill you’re suddenly keen to take further.
🛠️ Fresh terrain: Each placement gives you time to find your feet, get stuck in and leave something useful behind. You might help organise a community consultation, gather evidence for a policy brief or collate feedback to support a program evaluation. You’ll learn alongside your host team and contribute to its priorities, right down to service delivery and essential admin. Even big ideas need someone to send the calendar invite. From climate, health and the arts through to humanitarian work or on-Country initiatives, there’s plenty to explore. Bring your interests and an appetite to stretch beyond them.
💡 Connecting the dots: Mentoring, professional development and fireside chats will help you build knowledge and practical skills, and learn from people across the sector. Some a few steps ahead. Others with a career full of unexpected turns. You’ll hear how they made the call, what surprised them and which detour led to work they love. Alongside them, you’ll have a cohort comparing notes and helping each other connect the dots. You don’t need your career mapped out. This is your chance to explore different kinds of work and begin shaping a career around the contribution only you can bring.
Key criteria:
Your examples can come from paid work, study, volunteering, community life or your own projects. Bring your particular mix. We're building a cohort with different backgrounds, perspectives and strengths.
These are the skills that travel with you across every placement. We'll assess every application against the essential criteria. Bonus criteria are a plus, not a requirement.
Essential
🔥 Values in action: Your values have a way of booking themselves into your calendar. Maybe they've shaped what you studied, the work you chose or the community group where you've become a regular (you know everyone's name and how they take their tea). You've put time and effort behind what matters to you, and you'd like to build a career in the for-purpose sector. You believe thoughtful action adds up, and you bring the optimism and energy to back it.
🔎 Thoughtful and open-minded: You're curious about people, communities and social challenges that don't come with simple answers. You've gone in for a "quick look" and come out with three useful sources, an assumption put to the test and someone worth speaking to. You treat the people closest to an issue as the experts, and when their expertise or lived experience shifted your view, you rethought your approach and gave them the credit.
🛠 Enterprising, with good judgement: You spot what could work better, get involved and take ownership of getting it moving within your role. That might be a side project, a fundraiser or a practical fix for your team. You make the most of the resources at hand. You can tell what's yours to run with and what needs a green light first, and you know who to bring in when something carries key risk.
🤝 Builds trust: You've helped a group's different talents click into place like a particularly satisfying game of Tetris. Maybe you brought a quieter voice into the conversation or found common ground with someone who saw things differently. You communicate clearly and adjust your style to whoever's in front of you. People rely on you to keep them in the loop and follow through on your part.
🌱 Adapts and bounces back: You've brought opening-night enthusiasm and pack-down staying power. When plans needed a remix or a first attempt didn't land, you took on feedback, adjusted course and kept going. Bring that steadiness to two years of different teams, causes and ways of working.
Bonus
💻 Digitally curious: A colour-coded spreadsheet or an automation that saves everyone hours? Be still, your nerdy little heart. You've put digital tools to work, whether that's creating content, sorting registrations, taming data or testing what AI can help with (and double-checking what it hands back). Maybe your handiwork helped a team find the file called "FINAL_final_v3_USETHISONE" and give it a sensible home.
🤹 Keeps things moving: Rosters, deadlines, a packed event schedule or a community project with lots of moving parts? You keep several things on track at once, plan ahead and catch the small details before they grow.
Keen to get into the finer details? From eligibility to applications and how placements work, we've rounded up the good-to-knows in the Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ).
How to apply:
If any of the above resonated with you but you don’t tick every box:
👒 🧢 🎩 You should throw your hat in the ring, whatever your experience looks like so far. We’d love to hear from you! We’re committed to equal access and opportunity for all applicants. If you'd like any adjustments to the application process, let us know.
We’re reviewing applications on a rolling basis and we encourage you to apply early. You can refer to the FAQ for details on the assessment process.
Interested?
Create a profile (or complete yours if you already have one) on Ripple Opportunities, then submit an application by clicking on the fellowship listing and ‘Apply’. Please submit your resume and a cover letter as PDFs.
Your cover letter (max 1,000 words) should include the following points. Feel free to add headings for each section:
- What's drawn you to the fellowship and a career in the for-purpose sector. What kinds of teams, causes or skills are you hoping to explore over the two years, and where do you see yourself afterwards?
- An overview of your experience and how it connects to the fellowship and the key criteria, with one or two specific examples from work, study, volunteering or community life. A single example can show several criteria at once. For each example, tell us what you set out to do, what you did and who else was involved, and how it turned out.
- Your preferred location (Sydney or Perth), confirmation of your working rights, and your availability to start in February 2027.
To apply, please submit your application via Ripple Opportunities (www.rippleopportunities.com). Questions? Please contact hey@rippleopportunities.com.
Oh look! A legend is here reading some fine print! At Ripple our mission is to democratise access to purpose-driven opportunities. As a small team that curates hundreds of opportunities each week we do our best to share all the key information and juicy details. We often link out to the original listing and can't guarantee all details are included on our page, or the full accuracy as application windows and role descriptions may be changed by companies with short notice. If you're unsure of any details or closing dates, it's best to reach out to the organisation directly.