Assembling Voices
Your community, your vision, our support.
Assembling Voices is a Fellowship for artists, writers, scholars, journalists, performers, activists, workers, and others with compelling ideas for public initiatives that advance our mission—catalyzing conversations that lead to more just, equitable, and democratic societies.
2021
Year founded
9
Fellowships awarded
$255K
Seeded to Fellows
600+
Hours of support
Who creates knowledge? And where?
The biggest issues of our time aren’t just technical—they’re social. Ideas crafted entirely within the walls of universities risk being detached from the lives of the worlds they might transform. Outside those walls, organizers, artists, community leaders, and workers directly engage these same issues to transform their worlds, their communities, and themselves.
What would it look like for an academic institution to value, bolster, and learn from the expertise of those outside of academia? What would an equitable, non-extractive collaboration in knowledge production look like?
Assembling Voices is one way Incite is approaching these questions. Through this Fellowship program, we direct our financial, intellectual, and administrative capacities toward promising initiatives across the United States.
Pictured: The 2022-2023 Assembling Voices Cohort gathers in New York City for collaboration, networking and training.
About the program
Over the course of a year, Assembling Voices Fellows develop compelling ideas for public initiatives that bring people together around issues of democracy, equity, and trust.
Fellows are free to conceive and execute public programming as they envision it. Past fellows have built programming with a variety of innovative forms, including a home movie archive, a fashion show, and a community photography event. Some of the initiatives we support are brand new; others are initiatives that seek to achieve greater scale and depth with our support.
Incite supports these initiatives by facilitating administrative and intellectual support, including hosting fellows in New York City for tailor-made training and collaboration with Columbia staff and affiliates. Incite awards Fellows with $20,000 in income support and $5,000 in initiative support.
When selecting Fellows, we prioritize initiatives that are innovative in design, reach diverse audiences, address community-identified and community-specific needs, and show a way to post-Fellowship sustainability and growth.
Applications are currently closed.
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Income support ($20,000/year)
Initiative support (up to $5,000/year)
Intellectual support from Incite staff
Access to event and work space
Administrative and logistical support
Professional development and capacity building workshops and networking opportunities
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We are particularly interested in proposals that:
(1) are innovative in their design and presentation, such as those that mix interactive modes and activities, (2) reach diverse audiences, (3) address community-identified and community-specific needs, and (4) are potentially sustainable beyond the term of the Fellowship.
Successful initiatives amplify and engage with the talents, abilities, aspirations, hopes, capacities, and needs of the communities that comprise our democracy. -
This program is for artists, writers, scholars, journalists, activists, workers and organizers, and performers with a compelling idea for public programming that builds and sustains trust. We encourage people of all generations and nationalities to apply. Collectives will be considered. To participate, we do not require a minimum educational attainment or a minimum number of years of experience
If you have questions about eligibility based on your visa or immigration status, please contact assembling-voices@columbia.edu.
For all other questions, send us a note at assembling-voices@columbia.edu.
2023–2024 Fellows
[+] Assembling Voices Project Development Funds
In addition to our three fellowship awardees, Assembling Voices is honored to support two additional community projects through our Assembling Voices Project Development Funds. Each practitioner will receive up to $5,000 to develop associated community projects. Our fund recipients are The Out-FM Collective and Essex Learning Lab and Communal Garden.
Jay Grebe represents the Essex Learning Lab and Communal Garden, a Virginia-based community gardening and food sovereignty initiative that provides community programming about reclaiming traditional foodways, culturally responsive education, and community resilience. Incite will provide support as the organization develops a series of workshops presented free of charge aimed at expanding cultural understanding and exchanges between the area’s diverse communities and providing accurate historical frameworks of the Three Rivers. Workshops and presentations will be focused on food sovereignty efforts and foodways as manifested in Black and Indigenous communities, with interactive and hands-on components to encourage community engagement.
The Out-FM Collective is a multiracial group of queer journalists/activists that produces and hosts the weekly Out-FM program on listener-sponsored, non-commercial WBAI Radio, 99.5 FM and wbai.org. Out-FM seeks to expand and diversify their multi-issue social justice programming particularly covering BIPOC, trans, and youth-led movements. They offer opportunities for community involvement, self-expression (including storytelling and spoken word), and advocacy. Through the Assembling Voices Project Development Fund, Incite will support Out-FM in expanding their programming to a wider audience through the creation of a national podcast.
Past Fellows
