🔒New Haven communications firm finds growth with social justice focus

It started with a single question: Who controls the Black narrative in America?

That’s what Mercy Quaye, a former Black journalist and current columnist for the Connecticut Mirror, wanted to discuss in 2015, following a high-profile police shooting of an unarmed Black man.

“I thought we’d have 10 to 15 people show up,” Quaye said of the first event she planned. “We had close to 60 [attendees] from all walks of life.”

More community conversations followed and Quaye and a handful of others who helped organize them, began to call the discussion platform the Black Narrative Project.

“But we changed it to the Narrative Project because we didn’t want to solely focus on issues that impacted Black people but opened it up to tackling narratives that problematically impact all identities,” Quaye said.

By 2016, Quaye started hosting workshops at companies about diversity, equity and inclusion, but found that very few places implemented sustainable practices. So, in 2019, she transitioned her community conversation platform and its name — The Narrative Project — into a New Haven-based public relations and communications agency focused on social justice and amplifying marginalized voices.

And the approach has proven to be a winning formula.

Over the past three years, despite the pandemic, Quaye has grown from a sole proprietor to a team of 15 communications professionals and has expanded her client base from four in 2019 to 25 last year, including a number of local and statewide nonprofit advocacy groups such as Connecticut Voices for Children, Black Infinity Collective, and the Human Rights Funders Network.

She also recently signed a new lease for office space in downtown New Haven. Revenue is around $1 million, Quaye said, adding she has been selective in choosing clients — whom she refers to as partners.

“[Our services] aren’t a transactional exchange,” she said, noting that the Narrative Project is focused on working with partners to address 12 key issues: education, ending poverty, environment, food justice, gender equality, health care, immigration, justice system reform, police brutality, reproductive rights, restorative economic development and systemic racism.

The Narrative Project’s approach, Quaye says, differs from traditional PR, which typically focuses on four key steps: research, action planning, communication and evaluation. In contrast, Quaye’s model includes a thorough interrogation phase that examines data in the context of systemic realities that may impact an issue or a community.

As part of this process, Quaye’s firm delves deeply into impacted, often marginalized communities through surveys, focus groups and interviews with the goal of eliminating implicit bias or assumptions.

“This allows us to go beyond implication to enhance a campaign,” Quaye said, noting that such feedback can help alter and enhance messaging effectiveness.

She considers her model anti-capitalist in that rooting out biases and assessing systemic challenges alone takes an investment in time — typically, Quaye estimates, 90 to 120 days.

“With capitalism, time is money,” she says. “But a [social justice lens] requires [partners] to slow things down and think about an anti-racism approach more strategically.”

Communicating complex issues

That mindset appeals to Christina Quaranta, executive director of the Connecticut Justice Alliance, a Bridgeport-based nonprofit with a mission to end the criminalization of youth in Connecticut, which disproportionately effects minority communities.

In Connecticut, according to a 2021 report from the Sentencing Project, Black youth were 10 times more likely to be incarcerated than their white peers, one of the largest disparities in America.

Such disparate figures, Quaranta contends, speak to a system that is biased. Nationally, Black youth comprise 40% of incarcerated youth, but represent only 15% of the population.

“It is helpful to have a communications firm like The Narrative Project that comes with an anti-racist, social justice lens and understands where we’re coming from [on these issues],” Quaranta said.

In addition to raising the CT Justice Alliance’s profile through billboards and radio spots, Quaranta says the Narrative Project has also helped create two reports that highlight root causes of juvenile criminalization and captures input from those who’ve been part of the juvenile justice system.

Those reports are used to educate policymakers, donors and the general public.

Janée Woods Weber says the Narrative Project has helped simplify and streamline her organization’s communications. She’s the executive director of the Connecticut Women’s Educational and Legal Fund, a Hartford-based nonprofit that helps empower women and girls, especially those underserved and marginalized, including cisgender and transgender individuals.

“When we reach out to supporters, we are not only talking about women’s rights and issues that impact women, but we are also talking in the context of racial equity and economic equity,” Woods-Weber said. “With The Narrative Project we’re able to share intersecting, complex issues in ways that are digestible and that resonate.”

Expanded New Haven presence

And the ways that Quaye’s company can tell partner stories have expanded since its founding.

This past year, she’s added two new hires to expand web design and videography services. The company also offers media relations, communications audits and strategy, digital and social media, messaging and branding development and training.

This past spring, Quaye also inked a five-year lease on a new 7,500-square-foot Temple Street office in downtown New Haven, which includes room for future growth.

She is targeting a goal of adding one new partner per month this year. Her long-term plan over the next decade includes opening offices in Chicago, Los Angeles and Washington, D.C.

As Quaye looks at American society today — from growing economic inequality to the curtailing of reproductive rights to the troubling rise of white nationalism — she said she remains bullish on the demand and need for her company’s data-driven, social justice communications lens.