Dear Chicas Poderosas’ Community and Independent Media

Chicas Poderosas continues to build a stronger, more connected international community to represent all voices in the media. What started as a volunteer project throughout Latin América nine years ago, today is now a fully functioning nonprofit organization, with a core team of ten persons. During these years of the pandemic, Chicas Poderosas’ core team members have been working together in different countries without having ever met in person. Despite that, we are collaborating to build projects and grow Chicas Poderosas together as if we have known each other for a long time.

This is possible due to the values we share in Chicas Poderosas: authenticity, transparency, inclusiveness, commitment and transformation. Because we believe that critical thinking is, as the anti-racist feminist, intellectual, and activist Bell Hooks said, the most valuable tool for real transformation, the one that allows us to change the situation of the individual as well as that of the collective.

The core structural foundation where we share a regenerative culture of helping media be more representative and diverse, and let’s make sure this is not only about talking, but the media are ready to finally embrace the walking their talk. We run Chicas Poderosas with the community as a practice, the moving force of change. We stand for the feeling of belonging, the opportunity of sharing and co-creating a life filled with love, empathy and respect.

Community has become the most important support system in our lives, our tribe, even if that is losing its power in our primitive system imprint it belongs to our ancestral roots, it’s our connection with our spirituality; with the feminine and indigenous way of living.

We use technology in our favor, to be able to meet and organize ourselves, allowing for a plurality of views to be heard. Most importantly though, it lets our ancestry and the original worldview guide us to understand the territories we inhabit, our body and borders from the anti-colonial struggle. That is just like the women who weave, so we can weave with others the ideas of the impossible, the worlds we want, our common horizon.

“In my experience, I have done more regional collaborative journalism than individual journalism and I think it is powerful because it separates us from the narratives of the self, from the journalistic ego that we may have… It broadens our gaze and conflicts with us. In the end, you don’t feel the product is yours but you feel it is ‘part of’. Precisely, the products, the stories, are not ours” (Participant, September 2021).

Source: Social impact analysis report, Laboratory of Powerful Stories Ecuador

At the same time that we are each more independent in our daily lives, we start creating these strengths in what it means to have your tribe, your community, your support system, that caters to the feeling of being whole with your surroundings.

It is no longer about repeating the egotistical behavior we see in society and in big corporations. If we want to co-create a more diverse and inclusive world, we need to surrender our superiority complex, our colonial bias, our homophobic views.

The more than 10,000 Chicas Poderosas around the world are ready to drive this necessary change together.

We don’t intend to leave this responsibility to the mainstream media. True change comes from grassroots efforts led at the community level, telling stories the mainstream media does not report.

Chicas Poderosas is connecting independent journalists, those marginalized voices, indigenous, afro-descendants, and migrants of Latin America with the media organizations who want to be part of this change. These media leaders who truly understand their positions of power to be enablers of real change.

In 2022 Chicas Poderosas is focused on facilitating training to its community with collaborative journalism skills, investigations on diversity and inclusion, and we plan to team up with media outlets who want to be part of this change. We want to call the media in and facilitate a project where we can find the best practices for a real, solid change in media. Build trust as a culture and lead by example.

In 2022 we will study and analyze how the media is progressing in the realms of inclusion and diversity in Latin America media.

This story will come from within the diversity and we will finish with an extended study of best practices developed between Chicas Poderosas, media leaders and people from the diversities who will help shape a more inclusive media landscape.

Be the change you want to see in the world and join Chicas Poderosas community in improving diversity and inclusion in media in Latin America and Europe.