LeapYear Fellow

What This Is

LeapYear is a nine-month Christian leadership accelerator in Austin for high school graduates. It offers high-achieving eighteen to twenty-year-olds a unique year where they clarify their identity, deepen their faith, and gain professional skills through three core elements: Career Design, Leadership Development, and Spiritual Formation. Upon completion, Fellows leave clearer about their purpose, grounded in Christ, and equipped to lead.

How the Fellowship Works

Fellows live in two roles at once:

• A member of the LeapYear team, working 20 to 30 hours a week supporting cohort operations, communications, and execution under the Cohort Director and collaborating with other Fellows and the operations team.
• A participant in the program, spending another 10 to 20 hours a week working through parts of the LeapYear curriculum, including coaching, spiritual formation, and the Career Design methodology, to clarify their own next chapter and pursue personal interests.

What You'll Do

The fellowship is anchored in the operational work of running a LeapYear cohort. You are the person who makes the program run:

• Support the cohort experience: Monthly intensives, weekly co-working sessions, cohort dinners, retreats, and community gatherings. Own the logistics, checklists, speaker coordination, and day-of details.
• Capture what matters: Capture student quotes, new design principles, and moments worth remembering. Ship recap drafts, thank-you notes, and updates to the growing playbook after every event.
• Communicate with students and parents: Write weekly emails, track deadlines, follow-up on attendance, send a bi-weekly parent digest, and contribute to the monthly newsletter. Ensure your writing quality reflects how well we communicate what we do.
• Lead alongside students as a peer: Show up for everything, model professionalism, follow-through, healthy disagreement, and ownership. Facilitate when needed, check in informally, and build relationships with every student to serve as a bridge between them and the leadership team.
• Be an adaptive self-starter: Priorities shift, new things come up, and the work evolves with the company. Raise your hand to take initiative rather than waiting for a perfect job description.

What You'll Receive

• A formational year as a student: Full participation in the three-strand curriculum, bi-weekly professional coaching, and ongoing mentorship from the Cohort Director.
• Professional training: Training on tools used to run the startup, direct coaching on professional skills, and a front-row seat to a company being built.
• A network: Relationships with every student in the cohort, with our team of coaches and advisors, and with the network of founders, pastors, and professionals who work with LeapYear throughout the year.
• A stipend: $2,750 per month for ten months, paid in bi-weekly installments.
• Onboarding: Two weeks with the team before students arrive, getting your footing on systems, tools, and the people you'll work with day to day.
• Confidence in your next step: Investment in helping you figure out what's next, with most Fellows moving on after the year with more clarity about their path and a strong reference from us.

Who This is For

This is for people who:

• Want their early career to count for something specific,
• Understand that the trajectory of the next decade is shaped by who you're around and what you're being formed by,
• Want to learn how great operations actually work by doing them, not by reading about them,
• Want to keep growing in their faith in a community that takes formation seriously.

What We're Looking For

• Average recent college graduate with student leadership experience,
• Dependable: You finish what you start, ask for help before a missed deadline, and don't need to be told the same thing twice,
• Strong writing: You can draft updates in a professional way and take editorial feedback,
• Relational instincts with 18 to 20-year-olds: Close enough in age and life stage to build trust, mature enough to model what we're cultivating,
• A committed Christian with a maturing faith: LeapYear is built on an explicitly Christian foundation, and this role sits inside the spiritual formation work of the program, not alongside it,
• A learner: You'll get things wrong, take feedback, and grow. That's expected!

Logistics

10-month fellowship, August 1, 2026 through May 31, 2027
Based in Austin, TX, in person for all program days and events
Reports to: Cohort Director
Stipend: $24,750 (paid $2,750 per month) + all-expenses-paid access to the full LeapYear program ($23,900 value) including coaching, content, service, and more