Participation Options
Students may participate in the Voice Up Media Network in several ways based on their interests, academic requirements, and availability.
Paid Special Projects
Selected participants may be assigned paid projects at $20–$30 per hour for up to 10 hours per month.
Academic Credit
Participate for internship, practicum, field-placement, independent-study, or other academic credit.
Combined Participation
Some students may participate for academic credit while also completing separately assigned paid special projects.
A New Kind of Media Network
Most media networks begin with a subject — news, sports, music, business, entertainment. The Voice Up Media Network begins somewhere different.
We begin with people and purpose.
The Voice Up Media Network is being developed around the belief that every person has experiences, interests, talents, ideas, history, and stories that can contribute something meaningful to the world. Our goal is to create a media network where those voices can be discovered, developed, connected, preserved, and shared.
This is not simply a network that people watch.
It is a network that people can help build.
One thing matters more than anything else on this network: the truth.
The truth of our lived experience. What we have actually been through. What we have actually seen. What we have actually felt, survived, learned, and come to understand. That truth is the foundation of everything the Voice Up Media Network is built to share.
When you tell the truth of your own life — your history, your community, the things you care about — it does something. It reaches other people. It helps them see their own story more clearly. It gives them permission to share theirs. And that is how one person's truth becomes another person's turning point. That is the impact we are after.
We do not ask people to perform. We ask them to be honest.
The truth of your lived experience is the most powerful thing you can bring to this network — and the most powerful thing it can carry to the world.
This is all part of the mission: connecting people to purpose, and helping them elevate their impact. Your lived experience is not a side story. It is the story. And when you share it with purpose, it lifts up everyone it touches — including you.
We connect people to purpose. We help them elevate their impact.
And it all begins with the truth of what we have lived.
You Are Joining at the Beginning
One of the most important things to understand about this opportunity is that the Voice Up Media Network is being built now. You are not joining a 50-year-old media organization with every job already defined. That is intentional.
Early participants have an opportunity to influence:
You are not simply being trained to fit into an existing system. You are helping create the system.
Who We Are Recruiting
Voice Up is intentionally looking beyond traditional definitions of who belongs in media. We want students from different disciplines, professions, creative communities, universities, cultures, and lived experiences helping build the network.
Student Athletes
Athletes understand leadership, pressure, preparation, teamwork, resilience, identity, performance, and competition in ways few others do. Help develop stories and programming around athletics, leadership, mental health, personal development, career transition, community impact, culture, and life beyond competition.
Your lived experience is part of what makes your perspective valuable.
Journalists & Future Storytellers
Journalism students, communications students, filmmakers, writers, broadcasters, photographers, podcasters, and emerging storytellers can help establish the editorial foundation of the network. Investigate stories, conduct interviews, develop features, produce multimedia content, and help create new forms of purpose-centered journalism.
We want journalists who go beyond "What happened?" to ask "Why does it matter? Whose perspective is missing?"
Historians & Researchers
History is central to understanding purpose. We are looking for historians, history students, archivists, researchers, cultural historians, and oral historians interested in preserving stories that might otherwise disappear. Investigate people, places, movements, institutions, communities, cultural traditions, music, health, athletics, and social movements.
History does not have to remain inside an archive. Through media, it can become a living resource connecting generations.
Nurses & Future Health Leaders
Nurses are among the professionals closest to the real human experience of health. They see patients, families, systems, disparities, successes, frustrations, recovery, prevention, and resilience. Help translate those experiences into stories people can understand — covering public health, behavioral health, health education, patient experiences, healthcare innovation, and community health.
Healthcare knowledge should not remain trapped inside institutions. It can become media that helps people.
Innovators, Entrepreneurs & Future Leaders
Some fellows will help build the network itself. We are looking for students interested in entrepreneurship, innovation, artificial intelligence, technology, marketing, business development, leadership, social impact, community engagement, and emerging media. Help design a new show, build a digital platform, develop partnerships, or create something that does not exist yet.
This fellowship is especially well suited for people who look at something new and immediately ask: "What could this become?"
Creative Artists & Musicians
Music, visual art, photography, film, poetry, dance, design, and other forms of creative expression can communicate things traditional reporting sometimes cannot. Help Voice Up explore culture, history, identity, community, memory, health, belonging, and purpose.
We want emerging artists to help create what comes next. Creativity itself can become a pathway to purpose.
What Could You Create?
There is no single required media product. Depending on your interests, your project could become:
An Eight-Week Applied Experience
The fellowship can be structured as an eight-week experience designed to take you from discovery to a finished media product.
Humility
Begin by listening. Explore the Voice Up mission, learn about the developing media network, study different forms of media and storytelling, and identify the issues, histories, communities, creative interests, or ideas that matter most to you — without assuming you already know the answers.
Precision
Be exact and clear. Determine your audience, your story, your project, and the purpose behind it. Ask: Who needs to hear this? Why does this matter? Whose story has not been told? What would make this useful?
Connect
Share your developing idea with other fellows, mentors, professionals, creators, and students across Voice Up. A student athlete may learn from a historian. A historian from a nurse. A nurse from a journalist. And all of them may discover that their work is connected.
Build
Create your media product. Research. Interview. Write. Record. Design. Investigate. Create. Test. Edit. Refine.
Share
Present what you created and explore how the work can continue through the Voice Up Media Network. The goal is to leave the fellowship with something tangible — not simply something you studied. Something you made.
Your Writing Is the Skill of the AI Economy
This fellowship does more than help you make media. It actually helps you improve your real and true writing — the kind of writing that makes a difference in the opportunities you will have in the future.
Your writing matters because it reflects your ability to communicate precisely with AI in a way that drives innovation and creativity. In the new AI economy, that is one of the most valuable skills a person can have.
This is not a small skill.
It is the skill the founder is paid a very high rate to use.
The founder of Voice Up receives a very high rate of compensation for this exact skill. It is also what led to his work on three global AI projects with one of the world's leading brands. When you learn to write with precision, humility, and purpose here, you are building the same skill — and the same on-ramp.
“The ability to write clearly, persuasively, and authentically — without relying on AI to do it for you — is now an economic asset unlike anything we've seen before.”
— Art Fuller, Founder, Voice Up
PurposeDriven.health is Voice Up's writing platform — workshops, AI + human feedback, and a place to build your true voice.
A Pathway to Paid Consulting Work
The fellowship does more than teach you how to make media. It also trains and helps every collaborator step into a high-paying, part-time consulting role.
This work supports Voice Up's already ongoing global consulting with one of the world's leading brands. You are not waiting for something to start — the work is happening now, and the fellowship is your on-ramp into it.
This is not a separate program bolted on at the end.
It is woven right into the eight weeks of training.
As you move through Humility, Precision, Connect, Build, and Share, you are also building the skills, confidence, and professional readiness to take on real consulting work. By the end, you can step into a role that pays well, fits your life, and connects you to a global project that is already underway.
See the initiative already in motion at voiceupjobs.lifeWho Can Apply?
Students from virtually any academic discipline may apply. Undergraduate, graduate, doctoral, medical, and professional students may participate.
Your major is not the most important qualification.
Your curiosity is.
The Bigger Idea
Media influences what people notice. What people notice influences what they value. And what people value influences what they choose to do.
Media can help people discover what matters to them.
Introduce someone to a career they never imagined.
Tell the story of a community nobody was covering.
Recover a piece of history that was nearly lost.
Preserve the voice of an elder for another generation.
Help a student athlete understand the leadership skills they already possess.
Give an entrepreneur an opportunity to build something useful.
Give a musician a platform to connect generations.
Allow young people from completely different backgrounds to discover that their experiences may be connected by a common purpose.
Voice Up Media Network
Built by people. Powered by participation. Preserving stories. Creating what comes next. Focused on purpose.
We connect people to purpose.
Real Impact, Right Now — Gary, Indiana
This is not a hypothetical. Right now, the Voice Up Media Network is profiling a real American story — and it is exactly the kind of work this fellowship will create for communities across the U.S. and beyond.
Gary, Indiana: A Community Still in the Dark.
Tens of thousands of people are still without power in Northwest Indiana as the crisis stretches into its second week.
📰 LATEST NATIONAL COVERAGE · AUG 21, 2026
NPR reports residents are in "survival mode" on a ninth day without power. CBS Chicago shows the community coming together at the City Life Center. Both confirm the story is not over.
This is the kind of underreported, purpose-driven story the Media Network exists to elevate — and that fellows will help tell. Read the full report and support families through the Food Bank of Northwest Indiana and The Salvation Army Gary/Merrillville.