Case Study: The Voices for Economic Mobility Incubator
Supporting 28 diverse organizations shift the narrative on poverty and economic mobility in the US by providing cutting-edge training, rapid content testing and community-building.
Change the narrative, change the world
Breaking down the challenge…
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Toxic stories about poverty are one of the most stubborn barriers to economic mobility in the US.
The hard truth is that large swaths of the population are swimming in a sea of terrible and just inaccurate accounts about what poverty is, why it happens, to whom it happens, and how to address it. And yet, the stories of those who are struggling with poverty and intimately understand the systemic solutions that are needed are ignored.
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How do we support and elevate diverse voices on poverty that help broaden the conversation about the issues that inhibit mobility and result in necessary action? A cohort of funders, led by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, sought a partner to develop an incubator to support 28 diverse organizations, changemakers and storytellers launch pilot projects to better understand what it would take to shift harmful narratives on poverty.
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We developed the Voices for Economic Opportunity Incubator: a two-year program that provided resources for participants to foster community & collaboration, access training & learning, and leverage testing & experimentation to support the development of breakthrough creative, scalable and strategic interventions.
Participant organizations produced documentaries, digital campaigns, websites, podcasts and more demonstrating the importance of multi-pronged approaches for delivering narrative change. From a documentary encouraging West Virginians to see themselves as community leaders to rural bible study programs challenging individualistic faith narratives about wealth inequality, we tested a range of narrative strategies. All in all, incubator participants experienced tremendous growth that will benefit their organizations, their work, and the communities they engage with for years to come.
You can find some of the resources we built at www.narrativechanging.com
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As the lead strategist, I developed the structure of the incubator, the range of offerings we provided over the course of the two-year period and the impact, measurement and learning of said projects. I wrestled with questions like:
What is narrative change?
How do you “teach” narrative change?
How do you structure an incubator and its offerings so it meets the needs of a diverse set of organizations?
How do you build community and collaboration virtually?
What tests and experiments could support storytellers in telling better, more resonant stories about poverty?
One interesting insight from this work
For most issues we care about, the thing we’re up against isn’t extreme polarization (though that’s true for a sliver of our audiences), it’s just getting eyeballs on our content.
People are spending much less time thinking about poverty than you think. And when they do engage with poverty, the narratives and stories they see aren’t helpful. They’re feel-good stories focused on individual heroes “giving back” to the proverbial, persistent poor, or stories telling us to hustle or hack our ways into a miracle windfall. As storytellers, our first job is to tell a story that connects with people (i.e. one that doesn’t feel like an NPR exposé on poverty). Stories that connect to the values audiences’ hold and looks like the content they interact with. Yes, memes and cute puppies are welcome.
