Media Design Fellowship Program
The Media Design Fellowship at the Wealth and Work Futures Lab is a space for young creatives to grow. It brings together mental health support, community organizing, artistic expression, and hands-on design projects. Whether you’re into storytelling, advocacy, or just figuring things out, this program helps you build skills, connect with others, and create work that actually matters.
Throughout the fellowship, participants also work on a series of collaborative and individual creative projects that allow them to apply what they are learning in real time. The following examples highlight some of the projects the Media Design Fellows have executed as part of the program.
Guarded Yet Hopeful (Zine)
Our new zine weaves together personal stories, artwork, and data visualizations to illuminate how grief and loss shape the
lives - and futures - of Philadelphia’s 18- to 26-year-olds. The publication pairs first-person reflections with insights from our ongoing Narrative Inquiry Project, spotlighting both the weight of “grief paralysis” and the possibilities for healing, advocacy, and economic mobility.
Flip through its pages to meet the storytellers, learn what helps them move from paralysis toward well-being, and discover concrete calls to action for families, educators, employers, and policymakers.
Moment of Sharing
The Wealth + Work Futures Lab’s Media Fellowship Program hosted 60+ individuals to share their exploration with grief, loss, and well-being. By building media that explores invisible grief, engaging with peers around loss and well-being, our young people are making clear that they are ready to make the unseen seen to build a Philadelphia where young people can feel safe, valued, and heard.
Data Walk
We hosted a data walk to return the stories to the community and invite collective interpretation. Rather than analyzing youth experiences from a distance, we created space for young people to engage directly with the words, patterns, and themes that emerged.
Participants moved through a series of stations featuring quotes, visualizations, and key insights from the interviews- asking not just what’s here, but what does this mean for us? The data walk became a space of reflection, storytelling, and sensemaking- where knowledge was not extracted but shared, shaped, and deepened together.
Further Together
Wealth & Work Future Lab Fellow Charlotte Tatum and Research & Innovation Officer Alicia Atkinson presented research from our latest project “Grief, Loss, Young People, and the Workplace” at #FurtherTogether, the annual gathering of workforce development funders hosted by Workforce Matters Funders Network.
Their session, which was one of only twelve featured, invited participants to explore how grief, healing, and financial well-being intersect for young adults.
Change Pending
Through a collection of visual storytelling pieces, the fellows explored how young adults process complex emotions, translating their lived experiences into powerful images and thoughtful design.
The exhibit created space for both the artists and the audience to engage in meaningful reflection, highlighting the creative voices of emerging storytellers while demonstrating how visual media can be used as a tool for expression, healing, and connection. As an initial pilot, the exhibit also illustrated the potential of the fellowship program to nurture creative talent and foster conversations that resonate across communities.
