About Altavoz Lab

Altavoz Lab is a collaborative project to strengthen reporters at community outlets that serve Black, Indigenous, immigrant, and other communities of color in the U.S. with the goal of publishing stories that will enable local audiences to participate more fully in democracy.

Community journalists are the backbone of our democracy. Watchdog journalism empowers communities to get answers, and most importantly, ask pressing questions to hold elected officials accountable. We’re looking for reporting with the potential to change laws and policies or hold public officials accountable.

Click here to view the most recent fellowship application.

Read Our Stories

Altavoz Mentors

Valeria Fernández is an independent investigative journalist focused on amplifying the voices of immigrant communities. She is a 2022 Emerson Collective fellow. She recently received a Nieman Visiting Fellowship at Harvard University to develop Comadres al Aire, a podcast in Spanish focused on immigrant women, trans, and no-binary people’s health. Her most recent work can be found in The Guardian, California Sunday Magazine, Latino USA, 70 Million, and the Arizona Center for Investigative Reporting. She has produced documentaries and reports for Discovery Spanish, CNN Español, Sky TV, Al Jazeera, and PBS, and co-directed the award-winning documentary, “Two Americans,” which follows the plight of a 9-year-old girl fighting to stop her parents’ deportations under the reign of notorious Arizona sheriff, Joe Arpaio.

As an immigrant from Uruguay, she started her career at La Voz newspaper and later became a correspondent for CNN Spanish and the Associated Press. She is a 2009 Feet in Two Worlds fellow where she received training to work on public radio and crossover to English media.

Fernández was a finalist for the 2020 James Beard Award for investigative reporting. In 2018, Heising-Simons Foundation honored her with the American Mosaic Journalism Prize for her freelance coverage of underrepresented communities. She is a former professor and director of Cronkite Noticias, a student-led Spanish news service at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism. She lives in Phoenix with her husband and they are raising a curious toddler and a smiley baby.

Linda Jue is a contributing editor and writer for palabra. She is also editor-at-large for the investigative site 100Reporters and a reporting and writing coach for the Fund for Investigative Journalism. Among the many hats Linda has worn, she was an associate at the Center for Investigative Reporting, a magazine editor and associate producer at KQED-TV/San Francisco Focus magazine, and Northern California correspondent for C-SPAN. Her work has appeared in San Francisco Focus, KQED-TV,  GEO,  MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour, PBS Frontline and other outlets.

Astrid Galván is the editor of Axios Latino, a newsletter focused on the lives of Latinos in the U.S. and Latin America. She was formerly an immigration reporter at The Associated Press, where she was a member of the team that was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize in 2019 and which won two Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights awards. Astrid lives in Phoenix with her husband and two small kids. She is from El Paso, Texas.

Jaeah Lee is a contributing writer at The New York Times Magazine and a 2021-2022 Knight-Wallace Reporting Fellow. She has written for California Sunday, The Economist’s 1843 Magazine, Columbia Journalism Review, Topic Stories, Vice News, Mother Jones, among other publications. She is a recipient of the American Mosaic Journalism Prize for excellence in longform, narrative reporting on underrepresented groups in America. Jaeah recently served as a board member for the Asian American Journalists Association's San Francisco Bay Area Chapter, and as a contributing editor for The Sentences That Create Us (Haymarket, 2022), a book about the craft of writing for incarcerated people. Her work has been recognized and supported by organizations including PEN America, Type Investigations, and the Pulitzer Center.

Jude Joffe-Block is an audio producer, editor and journalist in Phoenix, Arizona. Her work has appeared in The Guardian, NPR, The World, The Associated Press, palabra and other outlets. She is the co-author with Terry Greene Sterling of Driving While Brown: Sheriff Joe Arpaio versus the Latino Resistance, which was named one of NPR's Books We Love 2021. She was a visiting journalist at the Russell Sage Foundation and is a former fellow with New America and the Logan Nonfiction Program.

Ruxandra Guidi has been telling nonfiction stories for over two decades. Her reporting for public radio and podcasts, magazines, and various multimedia outlets has taken her throughout the United States, the Caribbean, South and Central America, as well as Mexico and the U.S.-Mexico border region.

After earning a Master’s degree in journalism from U.C. Berkeley in 2002, she assisted independent producers The Kitchen Sisters; then worked as a reporter, editor, and producer for NPR’s Latino USA, the BBC daily news program, The World, the CPB-funded Fronteras Desk in San Diego-Tijuana, and KPCC Public Radio’s Immigration and Emerging Communities beat in Los Angeles. She’s also worked extensively throughout South America, having been a freelance foreign correspondent based in Bolivia (2007-2009) and Ecuador (2014-2016).

She is the president of the board of Homelands Productions and a contributing editor for the nonprofit magazine High Country News. In 2018, she was awarded the Susan Tifft Fellowship for women in documentary and journalism by the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University. Currently, she is an assistant professor of practice at the University of Arizona’s School of Journalism and an editor for various podcasts.

Dagmar Thiel is Ecuadorian-German journalist and CEO of Fundamedios, a non-profit organization dedicated to press freedoms and freedom of expression throughout the Americas. In her native Ecuador, Thiel reported for Ecuavisa and TC TV, and contributed to Spain’s El Pais newspaper and the German broadcaster Deutsche Welle. She is also a Donald Reynolds Institute fellow.

Valerie Vande Panne is an essayist and an award-winning reporter. She is the managing editor of Native News Online. Her work has been featured in Bloomberg, the Boston Phoenix, Columbia Journalism Review, In These Times, Politico, Reuters, and Salon, among many other publications, including Next City’s 2019 and 2020 Solutions of the Year.

Ms. Vande Panne is a former editor in chief of Detroit’s alt-weekly, the Metro Times, and a former news editor of High Times magazine.

Our Team

Ricardo Sandoval-Palos is an award-winning investigative journalist and editor whose career has spanned four decades.  In May, Ricardo was named Public Editor – ombudsman – for PBS, the nation’s leading public media outlet. 

Prior to joining PBS, Ricardo consulted with non-profit investigative news outlets such as InsideClimate News and 100Reporters, and was a supervising editor for Morning Edition, the flagship news show for National Public Radio.

Ricardo also served as an international editor with Center for Public Integrity in Washington, DC, and assistant metro editor for the Sacramento Bee in California. Between 1997 and 2006, he was a correspondent in Latin America for the Dallas Morning News and the San Jose Mercury News. 

Before that, in California, Ricardo won recognition for his coverage of the savings and loan scandal, the deregulation of public utility companies, and profiteering in the opaque business of international remittances. 

Ricardo also co-authored the award-winning biography,  The Fight in the Fields: Cesar Chavez and the Farmworkers Movement.

Ricardo volunteers as a board member for the Ida B. Wells Society, which focuses on education and opportunity for journalists of color. He’s an advisor to the Fund for Investigative Journalism, the Metcalf Institute for Environmental Reporting at the University of Rhode Island, and the Enterprise Fund of the International Documentary Association.

Altavoz Lab Reporters

Ambar Castillo is the daughter of Dominican immigrants. Born in Brooklyn and raised in Queens, she has worked with immigrant communities in the education and health fields from Harlem to Ecuador, Brooklyn to Boston, and Queens to Utah.

Ambar is a recent graduate of the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism, where she concentrated in bilingual journalism and health/science reporting with specializations in audio and narrative print media. She has worked alongside two StoryCorps teams to help produce stories of U.S. military veterans and facilitate dialogue between people on different sides of the political spectrum. 

As a staff writer at the Washington City Paper, a Poynter journalism fellow, a Local News Ideas-to-Action leader, and a former contributor to hyperlocal newspapers in the Bronx, Ambar covers marginalized groups and the ways in which they resist oppression. Previously, a Pulitzer Center reporting fellowship and Fulbright research fellowship led her to Ahmedabad and Mysore in India in search of health activists, storytellers, and a mean mango.

Tasmiha Khan, Borderless Magazine

Tasmiha Khan is an independent journalist whose work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post and Vox, among other outlets. Currently, Tasmiha covers a wide range of topics related to health, race, politics, culture, and religion. This past year, Khan was named a Fellow for Knight Science Journalism at MIT, a IFYC/RNS Religion Journalism Fellow, a Higher Education Media Fellow at the Institute for Citizens & Scholars, and Woodrow Wilson Higher Education Media Fellow. She was also a recipient of the National Geographic Society’s COVID-19 Emergency Fund for Journalists. Khan was awarded a grant by the International Center for Journalists to assist with brand-building and audience engagement and is a recipient of the Kozik Environmental Justice Reporting Grant from The National Press Foundation and the National Press Club Journalism Institute. She is also the founder of a non-profit to address health concerns for women in Bangladesh, an initiative for which she was invited to the White House twice by President Obama.

Valeria María Torres-Nieves is a feminist journalist from Yauco, Puerto Rico, who recently graduated from the University of Puerto Rico with a double major in journalism and advertising.

As a student, she served as a reporter and editor for the student-run media outlets Latitud 801 and Pulso Estudiantil. For the latter,  she directed coverage of the 2021 student strike in Puerto Rico.

Currently, she reports about gender, race, politics, and culture at Todas, a feminist media outlet in Puerto Rico that amplifies the voices of women in all aspects of public life, while acknowledging the multiple layers of oppression of patriarchy and racism.

Meera Kymal is a Founder/Producer at DesiCollective Media and the Contributing Editor at the magazine India Currents. She writes about issues that impact minority communities in the South Asian diaspora through the lens of social justice, politics, and the arts. 

Meera covers immigration policy, civil rights, the pandemic, climate change, and how racial disparities and health inequities disproportionately affect minorities and POC in a world that is more diverse but less equal.

Meera is a 2021 and 2022 Domestic Violence Impact Reporting Fund grantee at the USC Center for Health Journalism, which has allowed her to report on domestic violence in the South Asian community. She has received Journalistic Excellence awards from San Francisco Press Club and the California News Publishers Association. At India Currents, she has won grant funding from United Way Bay Area, the Facebook Journalism Project, the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, Network for Good, and Ethnic Media Services. 

Meera holds a B.A. in English from Madras University, an M.A. in Communication from Ohio University, and was a Foreign Fellow at Mount Holyoke College.

Anjana Nagarajan-Butaney is a Producer/Founder of DesiCollective Media, where she creates audio, video and written content that impacts the South Asian diaspora.  

She is also a writer for magazine India Currents, showcasing the stories of South Asians in the United States while exploring the social and cultural impact of issues like immigration, health, social justice, politics, census, elections, technology and the arts.

Anjana is a 2021 and 2022 Domestic Violence Impact Reporting Fund grantee at the USC Center for Health Journalism, which has allowed her to report on domestic violence in the South Asian community. She received an award from the California Journalism Award for Local Coverage of Election 2020. 

Having started her career as an electrical engineer, Anjana revels in the challenge of using both her analytical and creative parts of her brain to create impactful, data driven, and engaging content. Anjana holds a B.S. and M.S. in electrical engineering from Virginia Tech.

Frank López Ballesteros was a reporter at the newspaper El Universal in Caracas from  2007-15. He focused on national security anti-terrorism issues while monitoring the internal politics of several countries, including Cuba, Iran, and China.

He graduated from Monteávila University in Caracas in 2006 with a degree in journalism, and has a certificate in terrorism studies from the United Nations and Carabobo University in Venezuela.

López Ballesteros was part of the team of investigative journalists at Playboy Venezuela.Since 2017, he has been a contributor to Diario Las Américas in Miami, where he conducts investigative reporting on organized crime, corruption, and state politics in Florida. In November 2020, he was the only Hispanic journalist from Florida to interview then-Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden for a Florida newspaper.

In January 2020, he founded the bilingual non-profit Itempnews Project for Investigative Journalism (Proyecto Itempnews de Periodismo de Investigación). Itempnews seeks to shed  light on abuses of power and corruption and highlight stories of daily life of U.S. and Latin American society. The objective project is to discover and tell complex issues with thoroughness, boldness, and credibility, without looking away from everyday life.

Hundreds of jobs in South Florida depend on this trade of recycling cardboard, but, despite modernization and machinery, there are hundreds of people who live from collecting cardboard daily in the countless containers scattered around the city of Miami, a city where recycling is not exactly popular culture."

Andrea Pineda-Salgado is a bilingual journalist based in New York City. She is the community reporter for Epicenter-NYC, a community journalism initiative. Andrea’s work uplifts the voices of the marginalized. At Epicenter-NYC, she’s written stories about vaccine equity and the battle to fund excluded workers and immigrant tenants who were victims of a fire. Andrea is a 2021 graduate of New York University, where she earned a B.A. in Journalism and Media, Culture and Communications. As a journalism student, Andrea covered the 2020 presidential election, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the Black Lives Matter movement. As part of her thesis, she produced a documentary entitled: “Surviving Corona: The Street Vendors Caught in the Middle of The Virus and The Neighborhood.”