Co-Designing with El Tímpano's Community

Since El Tímpano’s founding, we’ve relied on the expertise of our audience to shape our work. Our editorial decisions and distribution strategies have been directly informed by listening, closely, to Latinx immigrants of Oakland on everything from what they want a local news outlet to look like to what their greatest information needs are. Our team itself has grown as community members have learned about the initiative and asked to become a bigger part of it.

But we knew we needed to move beyond listening to community members. We needed to build lasting relationships with them, too.

That’s how the idea of a community advisory board came into being. With the support of the Membership Puzzle Project, we organized a series of workshops over the summer to co-design that board.

But a funny thing happens when you listen deeply to your community: plans change. It turns out co-designing and joining a community advisory board was a bigger ask than our audience members were ready for at this time. Instead, we shifted to co-designing a community editorial meeting, which would allow anyone to join, whether they could attend just once or throughout the year. Through guided activities, participants could surface and discuss the issues most relevant to their communities and how El Tímpano could provide information and tell stories about those issues that serve their needs.

Head over to Medium to read about El Tímpano’s process of co-designing with our community, and plans to facilitate community editorial meetings starting in 2020.