Project 68 launches HBCU Impact Hub with Howard University

Project 68 has launched a new fellowship built to grow the next generation of Black storytellers, trusted messengers, and civic leaders, and it is starting at the Mecca. The organization announced its Impact Hubs on Monday, August 10, with the pilot rolling out in partnership with Howard University.

The Impact Hubs are described as campus-embedded media ecosystems, designed to reach audiences that have grown tired of or distrustful of traditional news. The program is a paid fellowship. It gives student creator cohorts editorial development, mentorship, production support, and direct relationships inside the industry. Fellows will produce short-form content, podcasts, shows, live activations, and in-person events, all grounded in culturally rooted storytelling.

The Howard hub will identify and back emerging storytellers, creators, journalists, and trusted voices already rooted in HBCU communities. It will also pull together the university’s existing communications world, its student creators, journalism programs, newspapers, podcasts, radio, and communications departments, into one coordinated narrative operation.

Kimberly R. Moffitt, dean of Howard’s Cathy Hughes School of Communications, said the partnership fits the school’s work of building a pipeline for the next generation to tell Black stories with authenticity and without apology. The program is led by Howard alum Darryl Banks, executive director of Project 68.

For Banks, the work is personal. He said creating opportunities for students at the institution that helped shape him has long been a mission, and he framed the moment as urgent. As efforts to erase Black culture and history keep growing, he said, investing in future leaders and cultural messengers is not just important, it is necessary. He called the hub a pipeline and an investment in the very purpose HBCUs were built to serve.

Howard is the first university partner for the Impact Hubs. Project 68 says it plans to open additional hubs in states across the country in the coming months, eventually connecting HBCUs and their surrounding communities to regional media ecosystems and positioning them as anchors for narrative power and civic engagement.

Project 68 describes itself as a culture-first organization working at the intersection of culture and civic life, built on the idea that culture is infrastructure. For Howard students, the hub is a paid seat at the table and a chance to build platforms while they are still on the Yard.