Since its inception in 2018, El Tímpano has relied on community input to guide our work. Long before we launched a news product, our founder Madeleine Bair spent a year listening to Latino and Mayan immigrants in Oakland, learning everything from their news consumption habits to their most pressing local information needs. Over time, we’ve continued to engage directly with community members through our text-messaging platform, where their questions, concerns, and personal stories drive our editorial team’s in-depth, investigative reporting.
When I joined El Tímpano as Engagement & Impact Manager in 2022, our community listening efforts primarily happened via our text messaging platform—in large part due to the limitations of the pandemic. But as restrictions eased and in-person gatherings became more common, I kept coming back to an idea: What if we invited some of the most engaged members of our community to meet with us regularly, provide feedback on our work, and serve as ambassadors for our text messaging service?
El Tímpano had experimented with a similar concept in 2019 after receiving a grant from the Membership Puzzle Project to co-design a community advisory board with audience members. However, co-designing and attending ongoing meetings was a bigger commitment than people were ready for at the time. The team struggled to build a consistent cohort, and any plans to revisit the idea stalled with the onset of the pandemic in 2020.
Enter “Oídos Comunitarios” (Spanish for “Community Ears”)—our second attempt at launching an El Tímpano ambassadors program.
From July to December 2024, we invited 10 highly engaged subscribers of our text message platform to meet with us monthly at the César E. Chávez library branch in East Oakland. Over the course of six sessions we dove into everything from media literacy to disinformation defense, solicited feedback on our text messaging platform and digital resource guide, and led an interactive training on community outreach and how to represent El Tímpano at local events.
Getting to spearhead “Oídos Comunitarios” taught me so many valuable lessons. In this post, I’ll share more about why I started the program, how my team made it happen, the impact it had on participants, and some lessons learned along the way. I’ll also share our exciting plans to expand the program to East Contra Costa County in 2025!
Adapting the “promotora” model
My idea for “Oídos Comunitarios” drew inspiration from the “promotora” model, a popular approach in health outreach to Latino communities that trains local members to share critical information with their friends, families, and neighbors. What makes the model so effective is its focus on peer-to-peer education, cultural relevance, and a community-driven approach to sharing information. I envisioned our ambassadors playing a similar role to promotoras, connecting El Tímpano to more community members and acting as messengers of reliable local news and information within their networks.
In the fall of 2023, I developed the idea for a 6-month pilot for the program as part of the Reynolds Journalism Institute (RJI) Community-Centered Symposium, an initiative that supports journalists in pursuing innovative, community-focused ideas with guidance from RJI and a cohort of peers. With input from my El Tímpano colleagues, I set the following key goals for the program:
- Grow the audience for our text messaging platform by training ambassadors to conduct community outreach alongside El Tímpano’s outreach team
- Gather feedback from ambassadors on our text messaging platform and digital resource guide
- Explain our community-powered journalism process and how ambassadors can participate in it
- Train ambassadors in media literacy and disinformation defense
- Have fun and build a strong sense of community amongst the cohort
With these goals in mind, we also saw this pilot as a chance to explore how we want to invest in ongoing and deeper engagement with our first cohort—potentially even focusing on just one or two of these goals in the future.
Building a replicable framework
After setting the pilot’s goals, I spent the first half of 2024 developing a budget and launch plan. I wanted to make sure we compensated participants for their time and expertise, so I allocated a $500 stipend for each, split into two $250 payments—one at the midpoint and one at the end of the program. Vanessa Flores, our Community Reporter who manages our text-messaging platform, would reach out to our most engaged community members to invite them to participate, aiming for a cohort of 10 people ranging in age, gender, occupation, and country of origin. Between meetings, we would engage with ambassadors in a private WhatsApp group chat, where we’d invite them to reflect on past sessions and share questions for upcoming ones.
I designed a replicable structure for each in-person session, drawing inspiration from jesikah maria ross’s “Lunch & Listen” and “Story Circles” event models at CapRadio in Sacramento. Each two-hour meeting would begin with an interactive icebreaker activity and end with a group reflection in a circle. We’d provide childcare to anyone who needed it and serve a tasty lunch at the first and final sessions, with coffee and pastries at others. Members of various teams at El Tímpano would lead sessions on the following topics:
- July: Orientation and overview of El Tímpano’s work
- August: Community outreach training
- September: Community-driven journalism
- October: Disinformation defense workshop
- November: Text messaging platform and digital resource guide feedback
- December: Culmination and next steps
To ensure smooth collaboration across teams, I scheduled three planning meetings with each session’s facilitators to prep the program and materials for each session. I also designed a printed agenda and a handout summarizing key takeaways for ambassadors to reinforce their learnings at home.
In May, we reached out to potential ambassadors and by June our cohort was set: 8 women and 2 men. They represented a snapshot of our audience—primarily women over 40 who had immigrated from countries including Mexico, Guatemala, Bolivia, El Salvador, and Nicaragua. Their occupations ranged from housekeeper and pre-school teacher to construction worker and waitress, while others were unemployed and looking for jobs. Some were highly active on our text messaging platform, while others had attended past workshops and events we’d hosted or participated in interviews for our reporting.
From shy subscribers to confident communicators
In reflection, I’m thrilled by how active and engaged our cohort ended up being! Over the six months, 9 out of the 10 ambassadors showed up regularly, with just a handful of them missing an occasional session here and there due to work conflicts or personal emergencies. I think what contributed to our high attendance rate was sending regular WhatsApp reminders about each session and asking participants to sign a program agreement during our first meeting. The agreement clearly outlined the commitment they’d need to fulfill to earn the full stipend, as well as what they could expect from us.
Additionally, each session led to valuable insights for different team members. For example, Community Reporter Vanessa Flores, who oversees our text-messaging platform and develops content for our resource guide, heard from ambassadors about the technical and linguistic barriers they face when trying to access resources, leading Flores to prioritize sharing phone numbers and physical addresses over links to websites that are hard to translate to Spanish or navigate on a phone. Ambassadors also proposed new topics for our resource guide, like how to obtain a work permit and how to avoid overpaying for immigration paperwork—topics our team plans to incorporate in 2025.
The outreach training part of the program bolstered our team’s capacity at events throughout the fall. Four ambassadors signed up to volunteer with our outreach team at local resource fairs and festivals, and Community Outreach Coordinator Etel Calles said it was helpful to have additional staff at larger, high-traffic events. She also said it was powerful for event attendees to hear about El Tímpano’s texting service directly from current subscribers.
“Sometimes people are shy or insecure about asking for help, but then they hear from the ambassadors who can say with authenticity, ‘This has helped me, this has given me a voice and a safe place to ask questions and learn things that I can pass on to my own family members,’” Calles said. “It’s coming directly as a testimonial from their own experience.”
For the ambassadors, volunteering with El Tímpano boosted their confidence and communication skills.
“It’s made me more open to talk, to express myself,” Felicitas E. said. “It’s helped me to become more open, to express myself more, to be able to speak with more confidence to other people.”
María A., another ambassador who describes herself as “extremely shy,” shared a similar experience. “The program taught me to be more confident and to lose my nervousness a little. I’ve never participated in any event before. Thank you very much for giving me the chance to.”
Ambassador Rebecca H.L. even encouraged others in her cohort to get involved, writing in the group WhatsApp chat: “It was so fun and exciting. I learned how to speak with the public and share the resources we provide at El Tímpano.”
In addition to strengthening their communication skills, ambassadors said they gained practical tools for navigating social media and online news through our disinformation defense workshop.
“For me, the workshop on misinformation was very important,” shared Rebecca. “I learned to be more careful about the news I receive today and to be more investigative and thoughtful.”
“The program taught me to not trust ads so easily,” added Felicitas. “I am now much more cautious and I try to share with those close to me that not everything people tell us [online] is true. We have to be careful with what we click.”
At the end of the program, ambassadors overwhelmingly said they wanted the sessions to continue. In a survey we conducted during the final meeting, 100% of them said they’d recommend the program to a friend.
Lessons learned
By mid-program, our team decided to step back and let the group lead, allowing it to naturally grow into a tight-knit, supportive community, with our team chiming in every so often to answer questions or send meeting reminders. One of the biggest insights we gained from creating the WhatsApp chat was the importance of engaging as a group outside of in-person sessions. Over time, the chat became an essential space for informal interactions where ambassadors could continue learning and building community.
During the in-person sessions, we also had to manage a variety of personalities in the group, balancing participation between more vocal ambassadors and those who were more softspoken. To tackle this, we co-created Community Norms during the first session and made sure to revisit them at the start of each subsequent one. This helped set expectations for respectful conversations and ensured everyone had a chance to speak, even if we sometimes went off on a few tangents!
On the logistical side, funding came out of our general operations budget, so we had to cover the costs for stipends, food, supplies, and childcare upfront. However, the pilot program served as a valuable test case when applying for additional grant funding to expand the program. And, while creating digital and print materials for each session from scratch was a heavy lift, it gave us templates that can be reused and adapted for future programs, making things more efficient down the road.
Next steps and future expansion
So, what’s next? In our final meeting in December, we gauged the ambassadors’ interest in continuing to engage with us through various channels, such as the WhatsApp group, volunteering with our outreach team, contributing to in-depth reporting, and providing feedback on our utility journalism. Every ambassador expressed a desire to stay involved in different ways. After discussing as a team, we decided to keep the WhatsApp group active into 2025 as a key communication tool, using it to share:
- Future volunteer opportunities with our outreach team
- Flyers for relevant local events and workshops
- Our editorial team’s Spanish-language journalism
- Reporters’ callouts to inform their ongoing reporting
Then, at the end of 2024, we were thrilled to learn that we received a grant from the East Contra Costa STRONG Collaborative Fund to expand our ambassadors program to East Contra Costa County in 2025. We’re eager to apply the lessons from our initial Oakland pilot in a new area, while also recognizing that the community there has its own unique dynamics and needs. Our next steps involve developing a new version of the program informed by insights from promotoras programs in East Contra Costa, including ones from Hijas del Campo and Village Community Resource Center.
All in all, developing the “Oídos Comunitarios” ambassadors program reinforced the power when community members play a role in our work fostering more informed immigrant communities. As ambassador Rebecca H.L. reflected in our culmination survey, “[Oídos Comunitarios] kept me informed of many resources there are and gave me the opportunity to interact with the community. It [also] inspired me to continue fighting for my dreams and to be able to achieve my goals.”
