Journalist, editor, and educator
Kristine Villanueva is a journalist, editor, and educator passionate about harnessing people-powered media to reinforce and expand community-based information networks. She is the mind behind the People’s Handbook for Diaspora Reporting, an interdisciplinary, crowdsourced reporting guide and newsletter that centers diaspora community information needs. As a reporter, she writes about community, food, and how people organize. She has worked in news organizations such as ProPublica, Resolve Philly, POLITICO, The Center for Public Integrity, and more. She has also served as the Vice President and National Board Representative of the Asian American Journalists Association, Philadelphia, and taught engagement journalism at the City University of New York Graduate School of Journalism for four years. She now teaches in the Community College of Philadelphia Department of English. Her experience in engagement journalism also includes leading digital, social media, newsletter, and SMS texting strategies to reach disenfranchised communities. She has also led nationwide crowdsourced, collaborative investigations. In her off hours, she likes to paint zines, go to punk shows, and cuddle her cat, Perseus (aka Percy).
Recent Projects:
People’s Handbook for Diaspora Reporting
A long-term, interdisciplinary crowdsourced guidebook on best practices in covering diaspora communities in the U.S. utilizing a newsletter to crowdsource questions, suggestions, share the process, critiques, and ideas. Crowdsourcing through forms, community calls, and building this guide over time helps ensure that standards are responsive to the needs of the industry, are constantly evolving, and are open to critique and discussion. Partner organizations include The Objective and Open News.
Phillypino Oral
History Project
The Phillypino Oral History Project is a community-based oral history and photography project capturing the rich narratives of Filipino immigrants who have lived in Philadelphia for at least ten years. The project focuses on memory work that delves into participants’ experiences during martial law, the implementation of labor export policy, the People Power Revolution, and more. As the project lead, I conducted interviews, developed the exhibition guide and exhibit copy, trained community participants in trauma-informed reporting techniques, and co-curated an exhibit at the Free Library of Philadelphia’s central branch. See the digital exhibition guide here.
News Ambassadors
News Ambassadors is a program that strengthens local news through solutions journalism, community engagement, and collaboration to reduce polarization and uplift common ground. Comprised of several local news collaboratives nationwide, students fill local news gaps by learning solutions journalism, community-engaged reporting techniques, and how to collaborate with local newsrooms and community organizations to maximize impact. Students also have the opportunity to be paired with counterparts in demographically dissimilar areas to expand their scope of learning. See the News Ambassadors newsletter and Instagram.
Selected bylines
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For the Objective
As newsroom infrastructures shift and diversity, equity, and inclusion rollbacks strip institutions of resources — especially under this current presidential administration — journalists have an opportunity to turn to the same questions archivists have been wrestling with about long-term preservation and ethical stewardship of memory.
Archives have historically mirrored journalism’s top-down approach, and many archivists, like journalists, are calling into question how traditional and systemic methods contribute to the marginalization of the very people they aim to serve. Methods practiced by those stewarding participatory and community archives can serve as a blueprint for a new journalistic approach.
For example, while it’s rare for legacy media to revisit published work and reckon with the harm it’s caused, the reparative descriptions movement in the archiving world connects members of marginalized groups with archivists to create more accurate descriptions of archival materials. Called finding aids, these descriptions guide collections, and archivists like Pratt Institute assistant professor Kathy Carbone add context instead of rewriting to help users understand and critically engage with the materials while still maintaining the accuracy of historical records.
“White supremacy is a big problem in archives,” Carbone, whose work utilizes crowdsourcing to connect with community members who have stories they want to preserve, said. Also the co-founder of The Amplification Project, she added that these reparative practices help archivists contextualize the past while deepening the relationships with communities who experienced harm.
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On most Saturday mornings, there’s a bit of hidden magic happening in the kitchen at the Old Pine Community Center near Fourth and Lombard streets. The Asian Food Collective turns the kitchen into a cultural hub by cooking all kinds of Asian cuisines together. For the collective’s members, cultural exchange through food brings an element of joy in building community. Plus, they get to feed their Philly neighbors while they’re at it.
“If you’re alive, you eat. If you eat, you deserve food,” said Hanna Kim, founder of the Asian Food Collective. “I feel like something that I try to cultivate in this space is a community of care. So something that I really emphasize is, when we are cooking together, I want you to eat the food.” Read the full article here.
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For the Atlanta Civic Circle, as part of the Center for Cooperative Media’s Democracy Day
Ranked-choice voting continues to grow in popularity — and so have the efforts to ban it.
Advocates believe it has the potential to make voting more representative of the majority, ease intense conflicts between political parties and make gerrymandering nearly impossible. Despite the upsides and successes, bans continue throughout the country.
Ranked-choice voting is a system in which voters can choose multiple candidates in a race. If no one wins the majority of votes, the candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated. A candidate is declared the winner after a majority of votes is won through a series of elimination rounds. If no candidate wins the majority of first preferences, the candidate with the fewest first preferences is eliminated and those ballots transfer to the voters’ second-ranked candidates. The process repeats until a candidate wins the majority of ballots.
“People don’t feel represented,” said Rachel Hutchinson, senior policy analyst at FairVote, a nonpartisan firm that researches and advances voting reform. “They don’t always like the choices on their ballot. People are ready to feel good about the choices on their ballot, better demographic representation, for leaders who are accountable to the majority and a political culture that’s less negative and focused on consensus building.”
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For Altermidya - Philippines-based outlet
Washington D.C. – Over 100 Filipino-American activists staged protests outside the White House in Washington D.C. against the recent trilateral meeting between Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr., US President Joe Biden, and Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida.
The protests, led by BAYAN USA, were mounted concurrently in cities including Portland, Seattle, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Honolulu, to denounce what the activists describe as President Biden’s detrimental “ironclad alliance” with the Philippines.
The activists argue that Biden’s so-called alliance with the Philippines is playing a significant role in the latter’s worsening economic crisis, heightened foreign military presence, and ongoing climate issues.
US military expansion slammed
During the summit, President Biden discussed a budget request of $128 million for infrastructure on Philippine military bases under the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement (EDCA).
Norynne Caleja of Malaya D.C. chapter, a Philippine human rights organization, said that this represents a strategy of buying the Philippines “piece by piece, people by people.”
The summit precedes the annual Balikatan or “shoulder to shoulder” joint-military exercises with the Armed Forces of the Philippines, which will take place in the Philippines later this month. The war exercises, critics say, is intended to counter China’s regional assertiveness. The said military exercise has been dubbed as the “largest iteration of Balikatan to date,” as more than 17,600 members of the AFP and the U.S. military are set to participate. Read the full article here.