I used to be the reporter you pitched.

Black L.A. owns this. Not a billionaire.

I came up with We Own This, AfroLA’s campaign for monthly giving. The idea is simple. The L.A. Times is owned by a billionaire. AfroLA is owned by the people who read it.

It started with research. I ran usability sessions on AfroLA’s site, and readers told us they couldn’t always find how to give and weren’t sure what their money paid for. So I rewrote every place the site asks for money, from the campaign page to the pop-up, so they all say the same thing in the same order and lead to one button that says the same word everywhere. I cut the adjectives we used about ourselves and put in facts a reader can check. I also wrote the script for the campaign video.

I lead our donor communications too, because the ask is only the start. Owners hear what their money paid for before anyone asks them again.

I’m on AfroLA’s senior leadership team, and I help bring in and direct the freelance illustrators who work across our products.

What this shows: Campaign strategy built on user research, one message on every page that asks for money, the emails that keep people giving every month, and working with freelance creatives.

Can you talk to our staff?

Leaders at HUD Region 9’s fair housing office asked me to help their staff reconnect with the people behind their cases. The office has three branches that each see discrimination from a different angle.

Over four months, I studied how the branches work together, reviewed recent cases and built a Fair Housing Month session for staff across Arizona, California, Hawaii, Nevada and the Pacific territories.

What this shows: Internal communications, speaking to an expert audience and working inside a large institution.

Explain AI to our customers

Stacker Studio hired me to write about AI for its business clients. I covered the AI trends to watch in 2025, why some businesses don’t trust AI, what it’s doing to HR departments and whether it can replace a lawyer.

Most of the job was knowing who to call and how to explain a fast-moving subject so anyone could follow it. Each piece had to read like journalism while meeting the client’s goals, like keeping competitors out of the story. They ran across Stacker’s network of nearly 4,000 publishing partners.

What this shows: B2B content on AI, thought leadership for clients, finding the right experts and making a fast-moving subject clear.

Yes, that Karen Bass

Reputation was the first podcast and the first product I put out under my own company, HEATDRAWN Media. It’s nine episodes on homelessness, and it starts with mine. Years ago, I lived in my car.

For a podcast nobody had heard of, I went after interviews that would get people to press play. I landed Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass and former City Councilmember Mike Bonin, along with service providers, researchers and people living it.

I also hired and art-directed designer Kelly Bernard, who now runs the studio Glitch & Grit, to create the show’s art and promotional creative.

It won second place for Best Limited Series at the 2024 LA Press Club Awards and the 2023 Housing Narrative Award for Best Podcast Episode.

What this shows: Booking high-profile guests to get a new show noticed, hiring and directing a designer, hosting, producing a series from nothing and handling sensitive subjects.

Back, with receipts

The Breakdown is AfroLA’s flagship newsletter on Black Los Angeles. After a staff change, it stopped coming out for a year.

The easy explanation was staffing. The real one was the format. Almost every section needed one specific person to write it from scratch, so when they left, nobody else could make it. I rebuilt it around a fixed set of sections that anyone on staff can put together in about half a day, with the extras running only when there’s something worth running.

The first issue back opens with a note from our executive director owning the silence, because a newsroom that asks readers to own it can’t come back and pretend nothing happened. I interviewed her about what happened, wrote the draft from the transcript, and she edited it into her own words. Every section is tracked from day one, and after six issues the numbers decide whether it stays one newsletter or splits into two.

What this shows: Relaunch planning, executive communications, rebuilding trust with an audience and deciding with data instead of guessing.

“Is this for me?”

In our site research, half the participants stopped to test whether AfroLA was meant for them. An Afro Latina reader wanted to know if “Black” included her. Another went digging through story categories to find out if we covered anything beyond one audience. Then the same question came up again when we were tabling for students at LACC.

Everyone already understood AfroLA was Black-centered. The name and the photos did that in seconds. The problem was our description, which led with who we serve before saying what we cover, so people decided whether they belonged before they knew what was on offer.

I recommended keeping the claim and changing the order. The approved line now reads: “AfroLA is a nonprofit newsroom that covers what shapes Los Angeles — our leaders, schools, housing, safety, small businesses — from and for the city’s Black communities.” It’s the line I now use everywhere AfroLA describes itself, so every channel says the same thing.

What this shows: Positioning, turning research into messaging and keeping every channel consistent.

300 neighbors to 1,300

In March, AfroLA’s Nextdoor account had about 300 followers and got whatever links we remembered to post. I treated it like its own product for community engagement, with its own audience and its own reasons to show up.

Neighbors kept telling us what they wanted: Useful local information, stories about their part of town and Black-owned businesses worth knowing. So that’s what we gave them, including older stories repackaged with what’s happening now. We also listened back. One follower’s comment turned into a published list of Black-owned businesses on the Westside.

Six months later it has more than 1,300 followers, and it’s still growing.

What this shows: Channel strategy, community management and turning audience feedback into content.

Going back to LACC

I went to Los Angeles City College, so this one was personal. I led the creation of a pilot that brings student journalists from LACC’s campus newsroom into AfroLA for bylines and mentorship while they’re still in community college.

The agreement is signed with the campus newsroom. The pilot is running this fall, and the newsroom has already agreed to spring.

Campus Connect is the newsletter that goes with it. Twice a month, it shares what’s happening on L.A. campuses with the rest of the city and helps students feel connected to students at other schools.

What this shows: Partnership building, program design, a companion newsletter launch and getting a new idea from pitch to signature.

There’s no playbook for this

Nobody Told Me This is personal essays for Black women 40 and up, written by our executive director and sent every other Monday.

I came up with its visual identity and the structure of each issue, and I set up everything behind it on Beehiiv so she could focus on writing. Since it launched in May 2026, it has averaged a 58.66% open rate and a 15.32% click-to-open rate.

What this shows: Newsletter launch, visual identity, audience definition and email platform setup.

An email people kept opening

The Thread was my yearlong newsletter that turned obituaries into a digital museum. It ended with Love of Craft, a six-part series that won a 2026 Communicator Award of Distinction for newsletter or email series.

The whole project also won a 2026 Online Journalism Award, and it’s written up in full on my AI Work page.

What this shows: Email series design, serialized storytelling, building a habit readers keep and using AI in production, with the rules published for readers.

Bring in the people who live it

As Director of AI Initiatives at The Black Policy Institute in London, I organized a public webinar on AI-powered misinformation with experts from Kenya, Nigeria and the U.S. The point was to hear what people are already doing locally, because solutions handed down from far away often don’t fit.

I came up with the project, found the experts and turned the conversation into a white paper. I was lead author, designed it and wrote the executive summary for decision-makers.

I gave the moderator’s seat to a teammate so he could get the experience. I’ve moderated plenty of panels myself.

Later, I produced and hosted Coded Out, a three-part AI policy podcast for the institute.

What this shows: Communicating with policymakers across countries, convening experts, writing for decision-makers and developing the people around me.

“We want an audio person”

Union Station Homeless Services knew me from my years at LAist 89.3, the public radio station, so when they decided to start a podcast, they wanted someone with radio experience.

I helped put Changing the Narrative together from the start. I produced, guided the branding and the topics, and kept the whole thing organized so it could actually ship.

What this shows: Podcast production, branding, editorial planning and keeping a client project on track.