The Fellowship
Every young person carries something unusual. Most of it is never found, never named, and never trained. The Kotcher Fellowship exists to do all three — from kindergarten through the Thirteenth Year — and then to point that ability at the places and institutions that need it.
Find the gift. Name it. Train it. Put it to work.
Work Bands
A band is a mixed-age working group with its own responsibilities, its own materials, and its own standard of finished work. Fellows advance when the work says they are ready.
Grades K–3 · Elementary Fellows
The first work band. Fellows learn to notice — their neighborhood, their school, the people who keep both running. Guided sensory work, storytelling, and observation at board meetings.
Discovery
Grades 4–6 · Elementary Fellows
Fellows move from noticing to asking. Research cycles, interviews with civic and labor leaders, and the first small project carried from idea to a finished thing.
Direction
Grades 7–8 (Middle) · Junior Fellows
The band where the gift gets disciplined. Fellows take a defined role on a real team, deliver public comment, and learn that ability without responsibility is just noise.
Control
Grades 9–12 (High School) · Senior Fellows
Fellows lead cohorts, mentor younger bands, and run projects with community and institutional partners. Portfolio, credential, and reference work begins here.
Command
Year 13 — post-graduate or rising 12th · Stands alone
A band of its own. One year between school and whatever comes next: a funded project, a research question, or a placement, carried with adult stakes and adult support.
Deployment
The Internal Fellow Option
At every band, a Fellow may elect the Internal Fellow track: taking responsibility for the Fellowship itself — its rooms, its records, its younger Fellows, its standard. Internal Fellows keep their band; they add a duty.
Programming
Bands meet around the Detroit Public Schools Community District school year, with simple sessions before and after every school board meeting and intensives on district non-instructional days.
See the programming calendarGiving is what turns a promising young person and a promising idea into work that reaches a community.