Roosevelt Institute Good Life Residents Program — AI and Finance Cohort 2026–2027: A $3,000 Stipend and Six Months of Senior Mentorship to Publish One Policy Essay on Who Controls the Capital Flowing Into Generative AI

Roosevelt Institute Good Life Residents Program — AI and Finance Cohort 2026–2027: A $3,000 Stipend and Six Months of Senior Mentorship to Publish One Policy Essay on Who Controls the Capital Flowing Into Generative AI

Most policy fellowships ask you to move cities, leave your job, or commit a year. This one asks for about six hours a month and one very good essay.

The Roosevelt Institute’s Good Life Residents Program is a six-month, part-time, remote residency built around a narrow and unusual deliverable: a single essay of roughly 1,500 words that advances a bold, people-centered policy idea, developed in conversation with senior advisors and Roosevelt’s own think tank directors, and then launched at a public event designed to get it in front of reporters and policymakers. The current open call is for the AI and Finance cohort, run in partnership with Data & Society, with applications due Wednesday, August 12, 2026.

It is a small program — three residents for this topic area — and the stipend is modest at $3,000. What you are actually being paid in is placement, editorial attention from a well-connected think tank, and a public platform for an argument that would otherwise sit in your drafts folder.

Key Details

What the Residency Actually Involves

The Roosevelt Institute describes the Good Life Residents Program as a six-month initiative for developing new leaders and elevating bold ideas across six economic policy priorities that make up its Good Life Agenda — an affordability-and-security framing built around lowering costs, raising incomes, and letting people live full lives. Previous and planned topic areas have included Social Security financing, Federal Reserve powers and independence, housing, and now AI.

Each topic area is run as a small cohort of three to four residents supported by one or two Topic Advisors: senior figures from academia, policy, organizing, or government who provide intellectual and strategic mentorship and moderate the discussion at the public event. That ratio matters. With three residents and up to two advisors, this is closer to a seminar than a fellowship class, and the advisors are expected to actually engage with your argument rather than sign off on it.

The stated responsibilities for residents are specific:

• Belong to a small cohort of three to four residents focused on one topic.
• Develop and author a roughly 1,500-word essay advancing a bold, people-centered policy vision aligned with Roosevelt’s worldview, responding to a topic-specific prompt.
• Participate in a culminating public event highlighting residents’ ideas, and work with Roosevelt staff to prepare for it.
• Contribute to press opportunities where applicable — op-eds, reporter calls, and similar.
• Discuss the topic with assigned Topic Advisors, Roosevelt staff, and fellow residents.
• Serve as an ambassador for the Good Life Agenda within your professional and public networks.

That last bullet is worth reading carefully. Roosevelt is not funding neutral analysis for its own sake; it is recruiting people who are willing to publicly champion an argument. If you are institutionally constrained from taking public positions on AI and financial policy — some government roles and some corporate roles are — resolve that before you apply, not after.

The AI and Finance Question You Are Being Asked to Answer

The framing for this cohort is unusually pointed, and it is worth quoting the shape of it because your application should engage with it directly.

Roosevelt’s premise is that the speed and scale of investment in generative AI technology and infrastructure is distorting the economy — affecting the stock market, profit measures, bond issuance, the pace and composition of growth, job creation, and trade policy. The institute notes that just seven tech companies account for more than a third of the S&P 500’s market capitalization, and that complex, sometimes circular financial arrangements are obscuring risk and fragility. Its concern is that AI investment is minting billionaires while pulling resources away from other uses and squeezing labor.

In partnership with Data & Society, the residency asks for bold ideas on how to shape, redirect, interrupt, or make more visible and contestable the flows of capital into generative AI. The official prompt lists topics including:

• What government interventions should be considered to enhance public oversight, risk allocation, and direction-setting in private markets such as the AI sector?
• If AI spending is crowding out other investments, what can be done to coordinate and scale investment elsewhere so the economy gets both innovation and resilience?
• What role can public spending play — through existing channels or entirely new institutions — to catalyze technology R&D designed to support workers, enhance sustainability, and strengthen supply chains?
• What institutional forms of democratic input are needed so that state influence over capital flows is less vulnerable to corruption and stays in line with democratic values?
• How should federal AI policy address increasingly intense public hostility to data center investments while accounting for national security and international competitiveness?

Data & Society’s policy director Brian J. Chen framed the partnership as putting forward new policy interventions to restructure the AI sector for public benefit. Roosevelt senior vice president Suzanne Kahn framed the stakes as whether the choices government makes now cause the AI boom to concentrate wealth and power or to contribute to a stronger, more diverse economy.

Note what is not on that list. This is not a residency about model safety, alignment, content moderation, copyright, or algorithmic bias. It is about capital: who supplies it, who directs it, what it crowds out, and what public institutions could do about any of that. Applications that arrive with a strong AI-ethics argument but no theory of financial markets will be reading the wrong prompt.

Who Fits

The official eligibility note is short and load-bearing: successful candidates will have demonstrated expertise in AI, technology, industrial policy, or a related subject area, and at least five years of professional or scholastic policy experience.

“Or scholastic” is a deliberate opening. A PhD candidate five years into a program studying financial markets counts. So does a credit analyst who has spent five years watching data center debt issuance, a labor researcher who has tracked AI capital expenditure against employment, or a state-level economic development official who has negotiated with hyperscalers.

The profile of the program’s first residents, announced in April 2026 for the Social Security and Federal Reserve cohorts, gives a useful read on the bar. That group included a JD/MPA candidate at Harvard Law and Princeton who had been an economist at the National Domestic Workers Alliance and a special adviser at the White House Council of Economic Advisers; assistant professors of political science and economics at UC Irvine and Carleton College working on global financial markets and macrofinance; a senior fellow at the National Academy of Social Insurance; a senior fellow at the Urban Institute and founder of PolicyViz; and a senior advisor at Human Rights Watch with more than fifteen years of experience.

Read that list and a pattern emerges. Roosevelt mixed early-career academics, mid-career think tank researchers, and one advanced graduate student with real government exposure. It did not fill the cohort exclusively with tenured names. If you are a serious mid-career practitioner without a famous affiliation, you are inside the range this program has actually selected from.

Materials, Application Process, and Timeline

Applications for this cohort go through a Formstack form linked from the official program page. Roosevelt has not published a detailed public checklist of required attachments for the AI and Finance track, so treat the form itself as the authoritative source and open it early — before the week of the deadline — so you can see exactly what it asks for.

Based on what the program demands of residents, prepare the following regardless:

• A current CV or résumé that makes your five years of policy experience legible in the first third of the page. Do not bury the relevant work under unrelated roles.
• A short, concrete essay pitch. You are being selected largely on the strength of the idea you propose. Name the intervention, the mechanism, and who it helps.
• One or two writing samples in a public-facing register — an op-ed, a policy brief, a blog post. A 40-page journal article is weaker evidence here than a sharp 1,200-word argument, because the deliverable is a 1,500-word essay.
• A clear statement of availability across September 2026 through February 2027, including your ability to attend the culminating public event.

The timeline to plan around:

Roosevelt has not publicly stated a notification date for this cohort. If you have a hard constraint — a competing commitment, a visa question, a travel window — say so in the application rather than waiting to be asked.

How to Make the Application Land

Lead with the intervention, not the diagnosis. Everyone applying will be able to describe AI capital concentration. Far fewer will arrive with a specific, arguable proposal: a public investment vehicle with a defined mandate, a disclosure regime for circular vendor financing, a conditionality attached to a particular subsidy, a state-level standard for data center power purchase agreements. The prompt uses the word “bold” repeatedly. Roosevelt is asking for a policy lever, not a literature review.

Pick a mechanism you can defend in a hostile room. The culminating event is described as a dialogue and debate over national and state-level policy options, moderated by senior advisors. Assume your idea gets pushed on in public. Choose something you understand deeply enough to survive that, rather than the most ambitious thing you can articulate.

Show that you can write short. The essay is roughly 1,500 words. That is a discipline, not a convenience. If your best evidence of writing is long-form academic work, consider drafting a tight 800-word version of your proposed argument and using it as your sample.

Be explicit about the “people-centered” test. Roosevelt’s Good Life Agenda is about affordability, incomes, and economic security. An argument about AI market structure that never reaches a household is a poor fit. Connect the capital-flow intervention to workers, prices, or public services somewhere in your pitch.

Respect the five-year bar honestly. If you are at three years, this is probably not your cycle — but the program rotates through topic areas, and housing, Social Security, and Federal Reserve cohorts have all run. Watching the page for the next call is a legitimate strategy.

Common Mistakes

• Treating it as a full-time fellowship. At 5–8 hours a month for a $3,000 stipend, this is a side commitment layered onto your existing role. Applicants who present it as a career transition misread the program.
• Proposing AI safety or content policy. The cohort is explicitly about finance and capital flows. This is the single most likely mismatch.
• Ignoring the public-facing duties. Press availability and ambassadorship are listed responsibilities. If you cannot do those, the fit is wrong.
• Waiting to open the Formstack form. Application portals for small programs often ask for something you cannot produce in a day, such as a reference contact or a specific essay abstract format.
• Applying to the closed track. The Housing cohort deadline was June 1, 2026, and earlier cohorts on Social Security and the Federal Reserve closed in March 2026. Confirm on the official page that you are applying to the AI and Finance call.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is the $3,000 the total payment? Yes — residents are provided a $3,000 stipend, plus travel and accommodations if needed for the culminating event. It is a stipend for a part-time engagement, not a salary.

Do I have to live in the United States? The residency is remote, and Roosevelt has not published a citizenship or residency requirement. The subject matter is US federal and state policy, and travel may be requested for convenings, so US-based applicants are the natural fit. If you are outside the US, raise it in the application.

Can I apply if I already work at a think tank or university? The initial cohort included residents based at the Urban Institute, the National Academy of Social Insurance, Human Rights Watch, UC Irvine, and Carleton College. Existing institutional affiliation is clearly not disqualifying. Check your own employer’s outside-writing policy.

Will my essay be published? Residents author an original essay that is elevated through a public culminating event and associated press opportunities. Roosevelt has not published the exact publication format for this cohort; ask during the process.

Are the Topic Advisors named in advance? Not in the public announcement for this cohort. Advisors are described as senior experts from academia, policy, organizing, or government.

Is this a recurring program? It launched in February 2026 and has since run cohorts across multiple topic areas, so it appears to be recurring — but Roosevelt has not committed publicly to a fixed annual cycle. Monitor the program page.

Official Links and Contacts

• Program page and application link: rooseveltinstitute.org/careers/good-life-resident-program
• AI residency announcement with Data & Society: rooseveltinstitute.org/press-releases/roosevelt-institute-and-data-society-launch-residency-on-ai
• Program launch announcement: rooseveltinstitute.org/press-releases/roosevelt-institute-launches-good-life-residents-program
• General program email used in earlier calls: [email protected]
• Press contact listed on the AI announcement: [email protected]

Next Steps

If the prompt already made you think of a specific policy lever, you are the candidate. Open the Formstack application this week, write your idea down in three sentences, and pressure-test it against the five questions Roosevelt published. Then build the rest of the application around defending those three sentences.

If nothing came to mind, spend an afternoon with Roosevelt’s Good Life Agenda writing and Data & Society’s work on AI and political economy before deciding. The residency rewards people who already have an argument they have been waiting for a platform to make — and this is a cheap, short, well-connected platform for exactly that.

Verify every deadline and requirement on the official Roosevelt Institute page before you apply. Details on small programs change without notice, and the page linked above is the authoritative source.