The Voices for Economic Opportunity Incubator

Narratives about what poverty is, why it happens, to whom it happens, and how to address it have dominated the US since its founding. With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, which brough mass unemployment, and outrage against racial injustice gripping the United States, the effort to change the narrative around poverty, and the opportunity this can bring, has never been more important. We needed to challenge perceptions about poverty and create accurate narratives to replace them.

We built an intensive incubator program that fostered community and collaboration through interactive virtual convenings, peer-to-peer learning, narrative change research and interactive workshops on audience development, storytelling and human-centered design. Our aim was to support the development of breakthrough creative, scalable and strategic interventions in order to begin to shift harmful narratives on poverty and economic mobility in America.

To help create a sense of pride and community through the incubator’s brand, we created a visual identity that used bright vibrant colors and imperfect shapes. The shapes make up a V to represent the variety of voices being heard through the initiative. The imperfect shapes throughout the visual identity demonstrate the value of co-collaboration and experimentation in pursuit of storytelling. The vibrant color palette is welcoming, energizing and inspiring, resulting in a brand that evokes community and pride.

The Voices for Economic Opportunity Incubator was a new model to support innovation for narrative change and social impact. Over the course of 18 months, it provided three pillars of resources and intensive, customized mentoring for participant organizations — community and collaboration, training and learning, and research. Through the organizations’ resulting projects and an energized brand, we began to shift harmful narratives on poverty and economic mobility in America.

Participant organizations produced documentaries, digital campaigns, websites, podcasts and more, demonstrating the value of multi-pronged approaches for delivering narrative change. They reported experiencing tremendous growth that will benefit their organizations, their work, and the communities they engage with for years to come. 

Further, the incubator actively changed the way that philanthropy, nonprofits, grassroots organizations, artists and activists work together — and we shared our model and learnings with the narrative change community so others can do the same.