Our Work

Offering Fellowships

2024 Fellowship Application Now Closed

Thank you to everyone who helped make this the best applicant pool to date! Stay tuned for announcements about the 2024 cohort.

Voqal Believes

People change the world.

Ideas are the catalyst for that change.

Voqal’s Fellowship is an investment in you as a person and a social changemaker. It is both a talent and organizational accelerator that prioritizes those historically pushed to the outside for a chance to enact their vision at center stage.

Voqal seeks social justice-oriented leaders, thinkers, doers, and believers with ideas for a new way to organize communities and bring about equitable social change. Our Applicant Guide provides an in-depth review of the program, application process, and evaluation criteria. You can access it on the link above or page through the guide below with ISSUU. You can also download it using the button in the top left.

Featured Fellows

Irene Romulo

Irene Romulo is a Chicago-born and raised Mexican. She started organizing seven years ago in Oakland around housing and immigrant rights issues. Since then, she has devoted herself to ending deportations and the criminalization of Black and Brown people in Chicago.

Romulo’s project, Cicero Independiente,  is focused on creating a hyperlocal space for civic engagement rooted in accessible news production by and for people of color, non-English speakers and those who are excluded from traditional media models.

Richard Wallace

Richard Wallace is a Chicago native and dually an organizer and artist in the fight to end economic violence and anti-Black racism. He is a graduate of Roosevelt University, where he received its prestigious Matthew Freeman Social Justice Award and founded Roosevelt University’s student chapter of the Stop Mass Incarceration Network.

Wallace’s project, Equity and Transformation (EAT) is an organization that uses an innovative approach to community organizing that harnesses the voices of Chicago’s informal economy to advance social change locally and increase equity for those who are the most excluded politically, economically and socially.

Alicia Nieves

Nieves is the co-founder and project lead at Streetwide. Before founding Streetwide, Alicia was a legal fellow with Justfix.nyc, a housing tech nonprofit in New York City where she helped low-income tenants use the Justfix web application to build affirmative legal cases against their neglectful and abusive landlords.

Her project, Streetwide, is a nonprofit project leveraging technology and data for immigrant communities.