Our Work

Offering Fellowships

Voqal Welcomes the 2023 Fellows

We are excited to announce the 2023 Fellowship cohort, a group of eight individuals leading bold social change efforts across the U.S. You can learn more about them in the profiles below and with this press release.

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 budding entrepreneur, both a talent and startup accelerator that targets those historically left on the outside for a chance to enact their vision at center stage.

Voqal seeks social justice-oriented leaders, thinkers, doers, and believers who have an idea for a new way to organize communities and bring about equitable social change. Page through our full Applicant Guide for an in-depth review of the program, application process, and application evaluation criteria.

 

Also in Our Work

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.

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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.

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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.

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Fellows