Ethnic and community media are the trusted messengers helping California’s institutions reach the people they serve through on-the-ground partnerships.
At a November 7 plenary panel held during the 2025 American Community Media Expo and Awards at the PG&E Conference Center in downtown Oakland, community leaders shared success stories of these partnerships with ethnic and community media statewide.
In Los Angeles, where 38% of the city’s four million people lack access to a park within a 10-minute walk, an urban greening initiative through the Bezos Earth Fund supported more than 20 ethnic media newsrooms to produce five briefings and 123 stories across at least six languages about park inequities and local needs over the last few years.
The Greening America’s Cities initiative “connected journalists to decisionmakers in power as sources. In turn, this showed those decisionmakers what their constituents most cared about,” explained Jon Christensen, adjunct assistant professor at the UCLA Institute of the Environment and Sustainability and founding director of the Laboratory for Environmental Strategies (LENS) at UCLA, which received a $545,000 grant for the work.
“This was all embedded in a context where Los Angeles, over the last year, has been conducting a Park Needs Assessment to identify priorities for investments, especially in low-income and multicultural neighborhoods that don’t have parks now,” he continued. “Thanks to connecting people in power to our ethnic and community journalism, we now have a measure going on the ballot asking for $320 million for parks.”
“I teach a course on environmental journalism. At the end of one lecture, a young man about to graduate, one of my most active students, stood up and said ‘I appreciate everything you’ve been teaching, I believe in it, but with all of the lies and polarization, what’s the point?’” added Christensen. “These practices are the way through. The antidote for the high-tech misinformation silo is high-touch storytelling about the things that matter to people.”
“Every time you go online, there’s constant information being thrown at people not knowing what’s true and what’s not,” said Devon Keeler, chief deputy of the Governor’s Office of Community Partnerships and Strategic Communications (OCPSC). “People have a lot of distrust of government programs. Relying on who they trust to tell them the truth about what could impact them, for breaking through that really thick wall of noise, community media is critical.”
Since Governor Newsom founded OCPSC in 2022, the office has launched fellowships, forums and conferences connecting ethnic media with officials and subject-matter experts of “underutilized programs — like vaccine access initiatives, extreme heat resources, disaster relief, mortgage relief, youth mental health apps and youth savings accounts — and how they impact the communities these media come from,” explained. Keeler. “The media can ask right there the questions they need to be messengers.”
A major challenge for OCPSC where ethnic media excel: quick and accurate multilingual translation, especially for non-written Indigenous languages.
More than 200 languages are spoken in California, and 44% of households statewide speak a non-English language at home.
“Say we have a flyer that we hand out that’s translated into Spanish that we need to get into indigenous languages, so we need an instructional video instead. But what if our communities don’t have access to the internet, or we miss the details relevant to them?” said Keeler. “Trust has to come first before we can see action.”
“If ‘in-language’ just means hitting a ‘translate’ button for all your material, you’ll never get out the information each community needs,” added Griselda Melgoza, spokesperson for the Department of Health Care Services (DHCS), which oversees Medi-Cal, the state’s version of Medicaid.
Nearly 15 million Californians are on Medi-Cal, just over half of whom are Latino.
Over the past few years, DHCS has led a multi-year campaign to explain Medi-Cal benefits and changes through online briefings, community engagement events and reporting fellowships for ethnic media to show the personal impacts of services like maternal care, youth mental health, dental and vision care, housing aid, food aid and in-home care.
“It’s most helpful to get questions from the community as early as possible about what people do and don’t understand. Ethnic media can not only capture that more directly than mainstream media, but it can answer those questions in a way that cuts through bureaucratic jargon to show the real impacts,” said Melgoza.
“You can’t make change that’s good for people if people’s voices aren’t in the mix,” said Maeve Elise Brown, executive director of Oakland-based legal aid nonprofit Housing and Economic Rights Advocates.
By bringing ethnic and community media to virtual and on-site briefings and workshops on resources available for issues like inheritance fraud, mortgage relief, loan debt and property tax issues, “we get to bridge the gap between helping our clients, and telling all the communities our clients come from that there free legal help at all, and this is what it can do for people.”
Similarly, the California Department of Aging (CDA) has partnered with ethnic media on fellowships and briefings over the last few years promoting older adults and family caregiver programs like in-home care, respite support and meal delivery.
“Numbers and analytics are sometimes not that easy to get with ethnic media, because many aren’t in the official ratings books,” said Connie Nakano, assistant director of the Office of Strategic Initiatives and Equity at CDA. “But messages may not translate directly in the mainstream. What caregiving means in the Chinese community, it’s different in the Indian community. Without breaking that down, neither community would access the support they need.”
“We see our impact by how community members are coming to the media, when we start to get all the phone calls saying ‘We want to do this story on aging, because our community has these questions,’” she continued.
“Narrative change is hard to measure quantitatively,” noted Christensen, “but it’s something that you feel when you see elected officials, community leaders, organizations and advocates all beginning to tell the same story that the people have been telling all along.”
