Press

Not For Profit, But For The People: The Power Of Community Media In Philadelphia (Generocity, November 2025)

“We have pressured through talks and meetings so that women who don’t speak English have access to these resources,” Toriz said. Over the past year, Toriz has seen signs of change.

While Voz Colectiva works to address the needs of Latinas, The Philly Download is similarly focused on serving a specific community: Black Philadelphians. 

2-day summit at WHYY highlights vitality of civic dialogue in local newsrooms (WHYY, April 2025)

On Friday, WHYY became a center of community discourse as the first day of the WHYY News Civic Dialogue Summit brought together a diverse crowd of journalists, educators, students and community members, all united by a common goal: building stronger and more responsive connections between local newsrooms and the communities they serve. The free, public event is a collaboration between WHYY News and Bridging Blocks, a partnership with the Free Library of Philadelphia.

The Community-Led Newsroom Bringing Vital News and Information to Philly’s Latine Community (Independence Public Media Foundation, March 2025)

A cosmetologist, community outreach worker, physical therapist, and small business owner sit together around a small, white rectangular coffee table littered with white coffee mugs in a small furnished room with an eye-catching yellow accent wall adjacent to an exposed brick wall.

The four Latina women— the director of the Pennsylvania Association of Cosmetologists, the outreach worker, a physical therapist in Norristown, and the owner of a popular local Colombian restaurant in North Philadelphia—are from different walks of life. And they are unlikely to cross paths in any other scenario except for this one: recording an episode of 2Puntos Platform’s “VozColectiva.”..

Latine: How Special Education for Latine Children Varies Between Neighborhoods (Philadelphia Neighborhoods, October 2024)

In 2019 Evelyn Toriz moved from El Paso, Mexico to Norristown, PA. She came to the country with her young children, her six-year-old Johan and her nine-year-old Angeles. Both her kids started attending local schools in their neighborhood and it didn’t take long for Evelyn to notice a striking difference between education in Mexico and Education in the United States…

Christina Shih Joins Press Forward as Associate Director (CityBiz, April 2024)

Another example is 2Puntos Platform in Philadelphia, which is part podcast and part community newsroom. I coached Emma Restrepo and Madison Rae Karas through the Knight-Lenfest Local News Transformation Fund’s year-end fundraising campaign. They are deeply rooted in their community and challenge the notion of what a traditional newsroom looks like. They’re embracing different revenue streams, building up fundraising muscles and also thinking about what type of tools and infrastructure they need to carry out the operations and mission of their newsroom…

Six LION members share the secrets to a great staff retreat (LION Publishers, August 2024)

“At 2Puntos, we work completely remotely,” said Emma Restrepo, founder of 2PuntosPlatform, “and we have team members located in Colombia and Philadelphia.” Last year, they added new employees and were experiencing communication problems. On top of that, “leadership thought that everything was urgent and important,” Emma recognized, which added a new layer of stress to the team. So they organized a one-day team retreat in Colombia focused on planning strategically to execute the goals for this year, taking into account bandwidth across the team. They also incorporated some training on prioritization skills.

Domestic violence, always difficult, can be even harder to escape in Philly’s Latino communities (BillyPenn, August 2023)

In Philly’s Latino community, barriers like traditional gender roles, religions that discourage divorce, and loss of community when fleeing all keep people from seeking help, according to local domestic violence nonprofits. Lack of resources for childcare and public transportation can also make it more difficult to report violations. These barriers are one reason the new Philadelphia Latina community newsroom VozColectiva produced a printed pamphlet listing resources as one of its first projects.

A new community newsroom in Philly is breaking the mold with a focus on Latinas (May 2023)

Across the U.S., media outlets typically have few Latino reporters, and the communities’ needs are often underserved. That was part of the impetus behind the founding of VozColectiva Newsroom. The new collaborative media outlet has five volunteer reporters, all of them women who immigrated to the Philly region, who work with a small global support team. They use printed pamphlets, WhatsApp, and social media platforms to disseminate information to their circles, reaching hundreds of other Latinas.