🎉 Rooted in Place. Connected across Communities.

We’re proud to welcome our Spanish- and English-language cohorts joining Altavoz from Pennsylvania, Michigan, Texas, Arizona, Kentucky and Tennessee, as well as our inaugural Nick Oza Visual Fellow, who is from New Mexico. Over the next seven months, nine fellows will work alongside nine mentors with expertise in data and investigative journalism, audience engagement, project management, immigration and environmental reporting and cultural fluency.

Fellows will receive between $6,000 and $11,000 in funding that may include audience engagement support for their host newsroom and additional editorial guidance from the Altavoz Lab team.

The 2026 Community Journalism Fellows are reporting on urgent issues affecting marginalized communities, including housing displacement, environmental justice, immigration access, public health, Indigenous rights, LGBTQ+ rights, and community-driven media. Their work centers the lived experiences of Black, Latino, Indigenous, and LGBTQ+ communities while documenting systemic inequities and highlighting local responses and solutions.

At times, their work will take the form of accountability reporting; at others — and not mutually exclusive — it will be about dialogue with and listening to their communities. Both share the goal of ensuring that people have access to life-saving information — and trust in those delivering it.

Altavoz fellowships are part of a broader strategy to strengthen the capacity of community-rooted journalists and the newsrooms and platforms they’re embedded in — spaces they are often building themselves. Our cohort is a convening, not a top-down model. We don’t offer a fixed method or prescribed expertise — we come together to learn from one another, and the program evolves with the fellows and mentors who shape it. We offer acompañamiento: walking alongside, fostering relationships and building bridges.

Over time, fellows become mentors and mentors help shape the program or step into new roles behind the scenes. In this way, Altavoz remains an organization built by community journalists, for community journalists — creating the conditions for them to stay, grow and thrive where they are. 

And when journalists can thrive, there is joy in this work, even in difficult moments.

—Valeria Fernández, Executive director and founder of Altavoz Lab

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