Centering VOICE, Shaping Economic Futures
The Valuing Our Insights and Community Expertise (VOICE) centers people with lived experience of financial hardship as co-researchers who define what economic mobility research should prioritize.
Reimagining Research with Community
The Valuing Our Insights and Community Expertise (VOICE) project positions individuals with lived experience of financial hardship as co-researchers in building an economic research agenda. Rather than studying communities from the outside, the VOICE centers the voices of people navigating economic transitions to identify research priorities that matter most to them. The result is a community-validated agenda and accompanying research that captures common experiences and key unanswered questions, providing researchers and policymakers with priorities grounded in reality.
What is Participatory Research?
Participatory research positions people with lived experiences as co-researchers and experts, not study subjects. The VOICE Project uses this approach to ensure that, with lived experience of financial hardship, rather than outside researchers alone, shape questions, guide methods, and interpret findings. By combining lived experience with research rigor, participatory methods produce insights grounded in the reality that traditional research approaches might miss. It’s a fundamental shift in who creates knowledge and whose voices determine what questions about economic mobility matter.
Findings
The VOICE Research Agenda reimagines economic mobility as panoramic – not as a straight-up or down line, but a journey that includes progress, setbacks, and something often overlooked: economic pause. Economic pauses can be forced by structural barriers that stall mobility, but can also be voluntary moments when people rest and recalibrate. However, whether pause becomes a launching pad or a trap depends on what we call the Grace Economy: the public policies, cultural norms, and community networks that determine who gets permission to pause without penalty. The VOICE Research Agenda examines all phases of economic mobility, including downward mobility, because understanding where systems fail people is essential for designing ones that don’t.
At its core, the VOICE Research Agenda asks: What if we studied economic mobility in collaboration with people who are experiencing it?
The VOICE Board
The VOICE Board is a group of 15 UpTogether members with diverse lived experiences navigating financial hardship and participating in research. They are dedicated to advancing community-driven change and passionate about ensuring community voices are heard in decision-making spaces. Representing communities across the United States, the Board has collective expertise in community action research, environmental justice, housing advocacy, public policy, energy equity, water affordability, tenant rights, and emergency preparedness. All Board members have had a touch point with formalized research in the past, most often by supporting mixed-methods research or participating in a research study.
What’s next for VOICE?
The work of VOICE does not end here. VOICE is a call to action for researchers and funders to embrace participatory research and partner directly with communities. The many Americans experiencing financial hardship whom economic mobility research seeks to understand are ready to be partners in that understanding. Communities are ready to partner.
To continue building this movement with us, a webinar series will open space for collective reflection from the economic mobility field and explore opportunities to build on VOICE and bring along new funders.
Hear directly from VOICE Board members in our first webinar on October 22 at 9am PT/12pm ET. Register HERE.
