Our Legacy of Programs
For nearly 20 years, The Opportunity Agenda combined innovative communications and messaging research, network building, and cultural and narrative strategies to advance social justice movements across the country. From launching fellowship programs that supercharge artists’ and narrative practitioners’ social impact to creating comic book heroes who inspire readers to lead with values, we are so proud of how TOA’s programs shaped the narrative change field. Scroll down for a snapshot of some of our past work.
Our Fellowship Programs
The Opportunity Agenda offered essential training, networking, and capacity-building opportunities for social justice leaders, communicators, and artists.
The Communications Institute, launched in 2011, became one of the nation’s leading social justice communications training programs. It brought together diverse leaders from across the country for intensive training, tools, and mentorship —strengthening their impact by advancing their media readiness, their ability to design effective communications campaigns, and their capacity to build resonant narrative strategies. Through the Communications Institute, TOA trained over 200 fellows.
In 2020, we founded the Culture & Narrative Fellowship, to leverage the vital role that artists and cultural strategists play in shaping public narratives. Fellows received a $15,000 award and strategic support for their proposed artistic or cultural projects over a six-month period.
In 2023, we introduced the Narrative Innovators Lab as a shared home for the Communications Institute and the Culture & Narrative Fellowship. The Lab brought together communicators, thought leaders, artists, and creatives for high-level multidisciplinary training, experiential learning, and opportunities for radical collaboration. Fellows developed cutting-edge, research-based narrative and cultural strategy skills while building a supportive community to co-create transformative, real-world interventions.
From 2009 to 2024, the Creative Change Retreat brought together a diverse group of artists, entertainers, media makers, advocates, and funders committed to transformative social change for a creative retreat combining strategy sessions, showcases of innovative work, and collaborative design projects. Some of these projects came to life and created social impact in the real world. By gathering in community, Creative Change participants created fertile ground for sharing, connection, and reflection to inspire, amplify and mobilize support for creative social justice ideas and interventions.
Creative Change Retreat
Narrative Research Lab
Launched in 2018, the Narrative Research Lab was designed to showcase and advance new strategic research within the immigrant justice movement.
The Narrative Research Lab provided enhanced access to research and messaging guidance for organizations and individuals working to support pro-immigrant narrative and policy. The Lab hosted resources through its publicly available digital library and organized a monthly webinar series for field alignment and collaboration.
Immigrant Narrative Strategy Table
The Immigrant Narrative Strategy Table is a narrative organizing hub and strategy table created for and by the immigrant justice movement. The project grew out of essential work conducted by Race Forward’s Butterfly Lab for Immigrant Narrative Strategy and takes inspiration from a range of messaging and narrative research projects within the movement. The Table has undertaken urgent research to establish a future vision for durable mindset shifts around immigrant justice. Additionally, the Table is exploring key audiences to activate those who are primed for strengthening the pro-immigrant movement.
The overarching goal of the project is to build long-term narrative and campaign infrastructure for the pro-immigrant movement. The Table is composed of representatives from the ACLU, Define American, Narrative Initiative, National Partnership for New Americans, United We Dream, American Immigration Council, Tennessee Immigrant and Refugee Rights Coalition, National Domestic Workers Alliance, and the Center for Story-Based Strategy.
Helvetika Bold: A Hero with a Heart of Gold
Helvetika Bold was The Opportunity Agenda’s very own social justice superhero, created to inspire changemakers to take on harmful narratives with creativity, courage, and humor. She was also one of TOA’s earliest cultural strategy tools—using comics, satire, and pop culture tropes to model how narrative change could be made accessible, playful, and powerful.
By day she was Ariel Black, a passionate advocate frustrated by the media’s complicity in advancing fear narratives and tired stereotypes. One afternoon, after a freak printing press accident, she transformed into Helvetika Bold—the “maven of media messaging”—with powers to flip the script on injustice and fight her arch-nemesis, The Mindset, who embodied fear, close-mindedness, and prejudice.
More than just a character, she reminded us that we are all superheroes in the fight for justice—that the power to change narratives lives within each of us.
Power of Pop
In 2017, as part of its Cultural Strategies work, The Opportunity Agenda launched its Power of POP research series. This series explored the impacts of pop culture vis a vis scripted television and pop-culture influencers on social issues. The subject matter spanned the issues of economic opportunity, immigration, racial justice, gender justice, and democracy.
As part of the Power of POP series, we launched several research reports, accompanying webinars, blogposts, YouTube video, and accessible social media content.
Health Equity Works
In 2023, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation partnered with The Opportunity Agenda to launch a new initiative; a health equity communications lab that would respond to today’s landscape. We knew we needed research-informed, coordinated action to stop the spread of misinformation and overcome systemic barriers to progress. Over the past 2 years, The Opportunity Agenda incubated Health Equity Works (HEW) — a strategic communications hub designed to help change how we talk about racial health equity in America and swiftly respond to emerging challenges as they develop.
As of August 2025, HEW officially launched as an independent organization to support long-term narrative development in the health sector. Learn more about Health Equity Works and join the network at healthequityworks.org
