A Philanthropic Contest Asked for Creative Fiction About Money. Here Are the Winning Stories

The Principal Foundation recently announced the winners of its first-ever short story contest, Money Chronicles: A Story Initiative, designed to increase financial literacy by using creative writing to spark conversations about money. A panel of judges from the writing world chose 17 finalists out of nearly 300 submissions sent in during the month of August.

Principal Foundation is the philanthropic arm of the global investment management company Principal Group. As I wrote here in August, it’s not unusual for a financial services firm to support financial literacy through its philanthropy, but asking people to write short literary works about money as part of this effort is, well… novel.

There has been a lot of philanthropic interest in shifting the narrative around issues like inequality, aging and government spending, but this is a rare example of a funder exploring the stories we tell about money itself. Entries covered an impressive range of money-related subject matter, including debt and family debt, handmade goods being replaced by factory production, the costs of addiction, the struggle to find work and make rent, and more. Organizers say they were pleased with the conversations the contest sparked, and plan to do a second short story contest in 2024.

Winners of this first contest include: Alyson Mosquera Dutemple, Cameron Walker, Carla Damron, Cedric Rose, Jin Kim, John Clark, Karen Heuler, Katherine Cart, Katherine Cofer, Lu Han, Lucy Zhang, Mandy Shunnarah, Marcie Roman, Matt Goldberg, Purvi Shah, Sara Rose Batchu and Zachary Kellian.

You can read the winning stories here.

Stories are also available to print on demand at cute short story dispensers located at Stavros Niarchos Foundation Library in New York City, Sip & Sonder in Los Angeles, South County Regional Library in Charlotte, North Carolina, Elliott Bay Book Company in Seattle, and Prairie Lights in Iowa City.

Using creative writing to counter a poverty mindset

Jo Christine Miles, director of Principal Foundation and the head of community relations for Principal Group, came up with the idea for the contest. As she told me back in August, in her previous role as a corporate attorney in New York City, she and her colleagues realized through conversations that many of them held outdated, inherited, negative beliefs about money that prevented them from making the best financial decisions as adults, even when they had moved well beyond early experiences of lack. At the foundation, she met grantee partners who spoke about the transformative role that talking about money beliefs played.

Based on this anecdotal evidence, the Principal Foundation commissioned a survey by YouGov to see how widespread these negative beliefs were. Of the 3,000 millennial and Gen Z respondents who said they don’t talk about money, 50% blamed their reticence on feelings of awkwardness or fear of being judged.

Armed with this data, Miles created the short story contest to expand the conversation. Principal Foundation invested $150,000 in the effort and partnered with Short Édition, a French publisher of short-form literature, and the Brooklyn-based literary nonprofit The Center for Fiction.

Now that the results are in, I reached out to Miles to find out how satisfied she is with the outcome. Very satisfied, she said. For starters, she was pleased with the number of entries, particularly given the fact that the foundation put out the call at the end of the summer and offered only a short submission window. She was also impressed with the range and creativity of the writers. Finally, the contest did generate the kind of conversations she sought on social media, in the press and within the company.

“We don’t have hard quantitative metrics or data, but we had a lot of nice commentary on social media around the contest,” she said. “Folks seemed to appreciate the acknowledgement the initiative gave to the stories we all carry about money. People also seemed to really want to tell their stories.”

Stories address funders’ concerns, too

Miles said one of the stories that really stuck with her was Sara Rose Batchu’s “Mango Grove,” in which a younger son tries to figure out how to save his family’s mango grove after his father’s death and confronts a history of unpaid debts his father left behind.

I was struck by the stories that touch upon issues funders seek to address, such as the challenges working people face meeting rent. In Katherine Cofer’s “Rat Race,” for example, an underemployed woman is threatened with eviction. While looking for a side hustle, she lands a gig exterminating rats. Armed with many toxins, she winds up arguing with a talking rat about his right to live in a store basement without paying rent. She now holds the power and has to decide how to treat this “tenant.” This story points to the shame people can feel when they can’t get enough well-paying work to cover daily living, the need to create a more just economy, and the efforts of nonprofits and funders to support working people without trampling on their dignity.

It called to mind a recent conversation I had with a recipient of Austin’s first guaranteed income project, organized by funding intermediary UpTogether. “People think the underserved are undeserving,” she’d told me. Cofer’s story sought to challenge this idea — one of the goals of the Principal Foundation’s contest.

I asked Miles if she told her former law colleagues about the contest. “I did. They thought it was a wonderful idea and it led to a conversation about where we are now,” she said. “It’s been 20 years since we started those conversations. Some have reconciled those feelings, and then you have some who are like, ‘I’d rather not think about it.’ Which is a very human response.

“That’s where I think the power of storytelling comes in. When you read a great story or see a piece of art, it strikes you. You ruminate on it, and you start to go deeper and deeper into your own thoughts and experiences. That is the power of art.”

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