Spotlight on community members

Our team collaborates across borders, combining strategic organizing, journalism and storytelling to defend lives, communities, and build better futures for local communities around the world. These are just a few of the talented people who work with the Fund for Authentic Journalism.

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Reporting on ICE and Community-Based Responses

Jackie Serrato and José Olivares

As mass deportation efforts create chaos in communities across the United States, Jackie Serrato and José Olivares use distinct, complementary approaches to document both the harm inflicted by U.S. immigration authorities and the ways communities are organizing to defend themselves and care for those left behind. A native of Chicago’s Little Village neighborhood, Jackie has practiced community journalism for over a decade as only a local insider can, through her work as a reporter and editor at the South Side Weekly and La Voz, the Spanish-language publication of the Chicago Sun-Times. José Olivares is an investigative journalist reporting on immigration enforcement and human rights for The Guardian, Drop Site News, and The Intercept, and has broken several major stories exposing human rights abuses at ICE-run detention facilities in the United States. In collaboration with the Fund for Authentic Journalism, Jackie and José share and teach strategies for creating journalism that helps to support movements for immigrants’ rights.

Storytelling Against Extraction and Mining

Lliny Flores and Allen Richardson

If current trends continue, the global extraction of raw materials is set to double by 2060, with devastating consequences for vulnerable communities and the ecosystems where they live.

Lliny Flores is a founding member of the collective Morelos Sin Mina, a local organization that stages popular community events, and engages in strategic collaboration with local media to create “counternarratives” in opposition to a proposed massive open pit mine in the Mexican state of Morelos. In conjunction with legal challenges mounted by local organizations, Lliny and her community have prevented the mine’s construction.

Allen Richardson is a seasoned anti-extractivist organizer and water defender in the midwest U.S. state of Minnesota. Allen has used comedy and dilemma actions to fight pipelines and is now on a team that uses science, law and advocacy to stop toxic mining pollution.

The Fund for Authentic Journalism has brought Lliny and Allen together to learn from one another’s strategies and to share their media and organizing skills with organizers and journalists involved in similar conflicts around the world.

Queer Cinema and Queer Territory in East Africa

Kevin Mwachiro

In Kenya, journalist, podcaster, organizer, and writer Kevin Mwachiro has shown that marginalized communities can be strengthened and organized not only through the act of storytelling, but also by creating territories where those stories are shared. Kevin is the co-founder of the Out Film Festival, East Africa’s first LGBTQ film festival, which has helped an increasingly visible queer community claim space in the face of hostile laws and social pressure. Through Out and his broader work as a writer and organizer, Kevin has helped turn storytelling into something that is not just representational, but practical and strategic as well. His trajectory and his commitment to building collective platforms for the LGBT community in East Africa make him an indispensable member of the Fund for Authentic Journalism’s global community, which partners with Kevin to help share what he has learned with organizers and storytellers around the world.

Reproductive Autonomy and Women’s Safety in Mexico

Estela Kempis, Tania Navarro, and Sandra Muñoz

Despite ongoing threats to women’s lives and their safety in Mexico, in recent decades a wave of movements organized by and for women has won unprecedented gains. Among the collaborators that work with The Fund for Authentic Journalism are three experienced Mexican organizers for women’s rights, who each stand out for their use of media in their organizing toolkit. Dr. Estela Kempis has been one of the country’s most visible abortion providers and abortion-rights advocates, both before and after the procedure was decriminalized in 2021, winning the Morelos State Human Rights Award in 2022. Tania Navarro is a feminist activist and accompaniment worker who provides political and community-based support to victims of femicide and sexual violence, and who also accompanies abortion processes from a perspective grounded in rights and reproductive justice. Sandra Muñoz is a seasoned organizer who combats online gender violence and defends women and girls’ digital safety, teaching them techniques to stay safe online. Together with other allies, their work shows how media and storytelling, when grounded in practice and struggle, is not just a way of communicating victories, but a way of making them possible.

Investigating the Lies Behind the “War on Drugs”

Bill Conroy

For decades, author Bill Conroy has focused his investigative journalism on the official duplicity and corruption of the “Forever War on Drugs,” and on its harms to society and human rights in the U.S. and Latin America. For years, The Fund for Authentic Journalism has helped Bill to keep his reporting alive and in circulation. Conroy has worked at newspapers across the country as a staff reporter and top editor, and was also a regular correspondent for Narco News, the online, advertising-free newspaper that covered the drug war from a newsroom in Mexico for two decades. He is the author of three books on the drug war: Borderline Security; Dispatches from the House of Death; and his latest, The Great Pretense: A Tour Through the Boneyard of the CIA’s War for Drugs. What he believes: Authentic Journalism walks with the oppressed. It doesn’t punch down. It leaves skin on the pavement. It draws blood.