SAN FRANCISCO, CA — Acción Latina announces the launch of the El Tecolote Community News Fund, which seeks to fundraise $52,000 in El Tecolote’s 52nd year. El Tecolote is the longest running bilingual (Spanish/English) newspaper in California and has served the Latinx community in the SF Bay Area for more than five decades.
This #GivingNewsDay is an exciting time of growth for our legacy publication! In June 2022, we onboarded our first full-time reporter dedicated to covering mental health and healthcare inequality through a partnership with Report for America. Last year, we met momentum with opportunity by participating in Newsmatch, raising $34,826 during our first campaign.
This year through December 31st, monthly donations to El Tecolote will be matched 12 times, and one-time donations will be tripled — thanks to generous support from the Knight Foundation, Heising-Simons Foundation and Newsmatch. Our goal of $52,000 will help El Tecolote sustain our reporter position – providing vital bilingual coverage for our Latinx community – and help cover necessary expenses such as printing, postage, translation, distribution and more.
El Tecolote was founded by Juan Gonzales and college students from La Raza Studies department at San Francisco State University in 1970. “Information is vital to any community’s ecosystem, so we don’t get left behind or are led blind,” said Gonzales. “As El Tecolote evolves, it’s important it honors telling our stories in all facets of life, continuing to serve as a training ground for aspiring journalists.” El Tecolote’s Community News Fund is therefore foundational to scale El Tecolote’s journalism reaching audiences that continue to be underserved and underreported.
El Tecolote’s current Editor-in-Chief Alexis G. Terrazas has been leading El Tecolote’s coverage for nearly a decade. “It was only when I started at El Tecolote eight years ago that I fully began to comprehend the responsibility of community media. Were it not for news outlets like us, the stories of our complex communities would continue to be mangled, marginalized and misinterpreted by mainstream journalism,” said Terrazas, “If we know our past, we have hope for a new beginning. That is how I view community media. Pioneering journalists have paved the way for people like me, and staying true to El Tecolote’s legacy of being a training ground for future journalists from underrepresented communities, I hope to continue to make space for the next generation of BIPOC journalists.”
As our cornerstone media project, El Tecolote is our main platform for storytelling and fulfilling our mission to build healthy Latinx communities through community media, cultural arts, and civic engagement. Artists and cultural workers enrich that mission and together create a vibrant archive that documents the lived experiences of our community.
Fátima Ramirez, Executive Director of Accíon Latina, El Tecolote’s publisher said, “I am proud to lead an organization that is documenting the unique challenges faced by the Latinx community which has been disproportionately impacted by COVID-19. When community members and scholars look into our pandemic archives, I want them to see the nuance and consistent coverage that our mighty publication put out during this crucial time. This fund will help build an infrastructure to sustain all of that hard work and ultimately allow us to better serve our community.”
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Donations are tax-deductible. Acción Latina’s EIN is 94-3039956.
Our mailing address is:
2958 24th St, San Francisco, CA 94110
Media contact: danny@accionlatina.org
Phone: (415) 648-1045