Shifting attitudes on poverty and economic mobility in the US
In 2019, the Voices for Economic Opportunity Incubator was launched to support a diverse set of organizations, changemakers and storytellers to more effectively shift harmful narratives on poverty and economic mobility in the US. Purpose built this incubator as part of the 2019 Voices for Economic Opportunity Grand Challenge with key partners, including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, James Irvine Foundation, Omidyar Network, Raikes Foundation, Winthrop Rockefeller Foundation, and the Schultz Family Foundation. The challenge set out to support the development of breakthrough creative, scalable, and strategic interventions across the US and to support innovation in narrative change.
We fostered community and collaboration through convenings, peer-to-peer learning, and networking opportunities for our 28 participant organizations across the US.
We supplied training and learning on cutting-edge narrative change research and interactive workshops on audience development, storytelling, and human-centered design.
We provide testing and experimentation tools, resources, and coaching to develop and test ideas and measure results with real audiences in real time.
National Participants
Our Impact
Participant organizations produced documentaries, digital campaigns, websites, podcasts and more demonstrating the importance of multi-pronged approaches for delivering narrative change.
Participant Deliverables
These were the main categories of participant’s creative content outputs. This list includes primary deliverables in participant’s initial proposals and secondary deliverables proposed to support those primary deliverables.
Incubator participants experienced tremendous growth that will benefit their organizations, their work, and the communities they engage with for years to come with:
• 79% reporting valuable skills learned from the Incubator
• 68% making strategic project improvements
• 68% having effective projects overall
Participant Testimonials
“The opportunity to pilot this idea, with enough funding to actually experiment with new concepts and launch a full narrative shift campaign, has been invaluable to us as an organization. As a small non-profit, it is unusual that we are able to invest real resources in creative design and strategic messaging work, and this project has proven how necessary it is to do so. Thank you for investing in our learning in this way.”
– Three Sisters Kitchen
“I just wanted to express our appreciation for being in partnership with the Purpose team through this process. We changed our work significantly through this partnership, and West Virginia will be stronger for it. The many ways that you and your team supported The Hub has been invaluable to us and we will definitely carry these learnings into the future.”
– West Virginia Community Development Hub
for Equity & Evidence