Laurene Powell Jobs’ Emerson Collective Launches New Cohort of Dial Fellows

When Aisha Nyandoro, who helped pioneer the longest-running guaranteed-income program in the country, testified before Congress this summer on what families need from federal assistance, she arrived anxious — but prepared.

“It was nerve-wracking, but I knew I had done my homework,” said Nyandoro, founder of the Mississippi-based nonprofit Springboard to Opportunities.

For months, she had been receiving one-on-one coaching on how to translate her mission for the national stage as part of the Dial Fellowship, an initiative created by the Emerson Collective, Laurene Powell Jobs’s philanthropy venture. This week, the group announced its fifth cohort of 12 Dial Fellows who, like Nyandoro, will each receive one-on-one coaching and other opportunities for bolstering their storytelling skills and redefining their communications strategy.

“It was one of the few times that I really got to talk about the women that we work with on a national stage, and a lot of them saw that testimony,” said Nyandoro. “They were so excited and felt so proud.”

Scaling up a mission through storytelling is about more than just raising revenue or expanding operations — it’s about creating new opportunities for your ideas to flourish, said Amy Low, managing director of fellowships and nonprofit media for the Emerson Collective, which was founded by the widow of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs.

“We’re thinking about communications in a way that might inspire others to learn from those ideas, and ideally, to advance them in their own communities,” said Low.

Its mission is inspired by the likes of Bryan Stevenson, founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, and Paul Farmer, the physician whose approach to treating the root causes of infectious diseases helped transform public health. Both Stevenson and Farmer “knew how to take a complicated idea and make their case” for social change with the kind of charisma that galvanizes others to take action, says Low.

This year’s fellows include Marc Bamuthi Joseph, vice president of social impact at the Kennedy Center, whose work focuses on combating cultural erasure, and the co-founders of the nonprofit SIRUM, the country’s largest redistributor of surplus medicine.

Since 2019, the fellowship, which is invitation-only, has offered hands-on coaching to 60 nonprofit and for-profit leaders whose work holds transformative potential for addressing social issues, but who could use support in the communications department.

Some fellows have gone on to write books or deliver TED talks that spread their ideas, said Low, while others have shifted their priorities and their approach to communications in subtler ways. Half of the fellows report hiring a new communications lead during their fellowship and three in four say they shifted their budget to focus more on communications, according to an internal survey.

For Nyandoro, her Dial Fellowship last year helped bring clarity and intention to her nonprofit’s national mission, which focuses on bringing financial freedom to Black women. Through the fellowship’s one-on-one coaching, she became more confident “taking up space” and sharing her expertise in national forums.

Barb Kinney

“The work that we do around guaranteed income has already become a model” on a national scale, she said. “That needs to be communicated so that we can make sure that the women who are pioneers in the work are not erased from the movement.”

Another Dial Fellow from 2022, Marie Zemler Wu, executive director of the nonprofit Foster America, rebranded her organization, built a new website, and expanded her communications team after her fellowship.

Perhaps most important, she says, the fellowship shifted her thinking around the role communications plays in moving forward her nonprofit’s mission to create alternatives to the country’s child welfare system.

“I used to think of communications as just a slice of the pie — something kind of next to our mission,” she said, but her fellowship “has really reinforced to me that communications is the mission and that carrying our message — our ideas out into the world — opens up the chance to have more of an impact.”