Introducing El Tímpano’s Advisory Council

Community is at the heart of El Tímpano, our mission, and how we work. We began not by launching a website but by building relationships within Oakland’s Latino and Mayan immigrant communities, and working with residents, community leaders, and local partners to design local news with and for those communities. In the process, we gained not only audience members but longtime collaborators, staff, and trusted advisors.

These relationships are our greatest asset. Today, we are excited to announce El Tímpano’s advisory council, composed of a number of individuals who believe in El Tímpano’s vision of community-centered local news, and have supported the organization’s growth and success. They come to us with backgrounds in arts, community organizing, Mayan- and Spanish-language media, international journalism, movement strategy, civic engagement, and more.

Josué Rojas

Josué Rojas has been the executive director of Acción Latina since 2017. As an artist, educator and Mission District native, Rojas has more than 20 years of experience in fine arts, community arts, arts leadership, and bilingual and ethnic media in the San Francisco Bay Area. Throughout his many endeavors, his work and vision have been characterized by a commitment to San Francisco’s cherished values of community arts and media, civic engagement, social justice, and empowerment for migrant communities and marginalized communities at large.

Henry Sales

Henry Sales is an activist, teacher, volunteer, and advocate who immigrated to Oakland from San Juan Atitán, Guatemala in 2011. He is the founder of Oakland’s first Mayan Cultural Festival, the co-founder of Oakland’s first Mayan community radio station, and has developed the nation’s first community college classes in the Mam Mayan language. His efforts to write a Mam legal dictionary was featured in a 2020 New Yorker article. Henry teaches Mayan dance, leads a Mayan soccer team, and coordinates events with various Bay Area Mayan communities.

Mai-Ling Garcia

Mai-Ling Garcia is head of digital strategy and engagement for the City and County of San Francisco, after holding a similar position for six years for the City of Oakland. Before joining city government, Mai-Ling was an e-commerce and digital marketing manager for Back to the Roots, a food broker in Oakland, California. She’s served as a senior policy analyst with Swords to Plowshares, a San Francisco-based veterans organization; a veteran employment specialist with the U.S. Department of Labor; and a researcher with the University of Berkeley’s Haas Scholars Program, where she herself earned a sociology degree.

Sophie Lan Hou

Sophie Lan Hou is Incubation Design Lead at Movement Strategy Center, working to nurture and accelerate transformational movement leaders and movements. She collaborates across cultures and disciplines to transform complex challenges into opportunities for design and innovation. She draws on a diverse background of global studies, community development, and interdisciplinary art to inform her work as a Designer and Strategist. Well-versed in transdisciplinary design strategies, systems thinking, and open innovation methods, she brings an adaptive talent and spirit of pragmatic optimism to a diverse array of projects. Throughout her work, Sophie constantly seeks to discover, celebrate and empower our shared experience as living beings.

Marcia Parker

Marcia Parker is publisher and chief operating officer of CALmatters, a nonprofit journalism organization covering California politics, policies and personalities. Before she joined CALMatters, Marcia was Editorial Director for Patch’s West Coast local news sites, CIR’s California Watch site launch manager, and Assistant Dean at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism. She is on the boards of the Institute for Nonprofit News and the Emma Bowen Foundation, and serves on the Stanford Knight Journalism Fellowships selection committee.

Mario Corea

Mario Corea was born in El Salvador, raised in the Bay Area, and is deeply involved in Oakland’s Latino immigrant community through his work in health education and his volunteer efforts teaching English and computer skills to new immigrants. His involvement in Latino media dates back to his years in Washington State as distributions coordinator for the regional bilingual newspaper, Tú Decides.

Jesse Hardman

Jesse Hardman runs the The Listening Post Collective, which supports media startups focused on creating sustainable community information hubs in more than two dozen locations including Fresno, Omaha, and New Orleans. He also specializes in humanitarian news projects, including one at the US/Mexico border, which delivers news to migrants about legal issues, public health, shelter, jobs, and education. He’s done similar work in Sri Lanka during its civil war, in Pakistan with internally displaced families, and in South America working with victims of natural disasters. Jesse’s a veteran reporter with 20 years of experience in public radio (NPR), print (Al Jazeera, the Atlantic, the Guardian), and video (Time.com), and he’s taught as an assistant professor at The City University of New York’s Graduate School of Journalism, and Columbia University’s School for International and Public Affairs.

Adriana Morga

Adriana Morga is a senior at San Francisco State University majoring in photojournalism, though she also has experience in print and radio. Morga, who was born in Tijuana, Mexico, has spent her developing career covering the Latino community for English- and Spanish-language publications including KQED, Al Día, KALW and El Tecolote. As a Marcus Undergraduate Research Fellow, she is researching Latinx media in the Bay Area.

Daniela Gerson

Daniela Gerson is an assistant professor of Journalism at California State University, Northridge, and co-founder and editor of the weekly immigration newsletter, Migratory Notes. Previously, as West Coast Director at the Center for Community Media at the Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at City University of New York, she led efforts to expand to a national initiative. She was also a community engagement editor at the LA Times; founding editor of a trilingual hyperlocal publication affiliated with USC Annenberg researchers; and an immigration reporter for the New York Sun. She has reported for outlets including WNYC: New York Public Radio, The World, Der Spiegel, Financial Times, CNN and The New York Times.

Ruxandra Guidi

Ruxandra Guidi has been telling nonfiction and news stories for more than two decades. Her reporting for public radio, magazines, and various multimedia outlets has taken her throughout the United States, the Caribbean, South and Central America, as well as Mexico and the U.S.-Mexico border region. She is the president of the board of Homelands Productions, a journalism nonprofit cooperative founded in 1989, and a contributing editor for the 50 year-old nonprofit magazine High Country News. Currently, she is an assistant professor of practice at the University of Arizona’s School of Journalism, and the assistant director of its upcoming Bilingual Journalism Program out of Tucson, Arizona.

As a non-governing body, El Tímpano’s advisory council provides strategic guidance to El Tímpano’s leadership team. It will continue to evolve, and represents just a fraction of the larger community that is a part of El Tímpano’s work. For those interested in supporting El Tímpano in other ways, sign up for our newsletter, and don’t hesitate to reach out. As a fiscally sponsored organization, El Tímpano’s governing board is that of Independent Arts & Media.