Live What You Believe

SAN FRANCISCO — MLIFE will launch The MLIFE Collective, a personal, leadership, and spiritual development fellowship for people ages 18 to 35.

Beginning in January 2027, MLIFE will bring together established and aspiring leaders from the United States, Kenya, and Ghana for a six-month fellowship designed for people drawn to a different way of living.

Its anti-colonial framework will examine how colonialism, patriarchy, heteronormativity, sexism, and classism enter our beliefs, relationships, public life, and understanding of whose knowledge matters.

“Unlike programs that begin by asking what a person wants to build, The MLIFE Collective will begin somewhere less comfortable: What has built you, and how faithfully does the life you lead reflect what you claim to believe?” said Mwangi Mukami.

The Collective invites prospective Fellows and Navigators who are willing to wrestle with the distance between values and practices, engage in liberating pedagogy, and explore economic justice through stewardship and sustainability rather than extraction.

Participants aged 18 to 24 will join as Fellows. Those aged 25 to 35 will join as Navigators.

The fellowship is for people who exhibit one or more of these characteristics: spiritually curious, whether deconstructing, agnostic, or somewhere in between; drawn to artistic expression through music, art, and poetry; open to sexual fluidity and not confined by rigid ideas about masculine and feminine identities or gay and straight labels; and unthreatened by pluralism or different expressions of spirituality.

These subjects will not sit at the edges of the fellowship. They will shape the curriculum’s center.

The fellowship will blend spirituality, technology, education, and the arts across three frames.

• Frame I: the Inward Journey, will examine what makes us: our values, lived experiences, beliefs, identities, and vantage points. It will ask how these forces shape what we notice, what we ignore, and who we are becoming.
• Frame II: the Outward Journey, will turn toward society. Participants will study the histories, systems, relationships, and conditions molding the world around them, then challenge what must be challenged, protected, repaired, or reimagined.
• Frame III: the Communal Journey, will ask how we lead, why we lead, and for what purpose. The work will move from private conviction toward shared responsibility, mutual aid, community power, collective action, and public service.

Fellows and Navigators will meet on Mondays to discuss ideas and issues emerging from the curriculum. On Saturdays, they will organize the MLIFE Circle, a spiritual space founded on Abrahamic traditions. The Circle will test whether intellectual commitments can survive contact with community, difference, and responsibility.

Accepted participants will receive a $50 monthly stipend throughout the fellowship. 

The application fee is $50, nonrefundable, with no waiver. 

Full application information will be published on the MLIFE website on October 31, 2026. Applications will remain open from November 1 through November 30.

The MLIFE Collective begins with a conviction: we already carry knowledge, imagination, resilience, and the capacity to create a different world. That is our endowment.

The harder question is what we will do with it. ⏶