Oakland Voices is pleased to announce that three dynamic interns have joined the Oakland Voices team for summer 2025.
Dow Jones News Fund Interns
We have two interns joining our newsroom for 10 weeks as Dow Jones News Fund interns.
Emewodesh Eshete is a rising senior at the University of California, Berkeley. She’s reported for The Daily Californian since her freshman year. Her work at the Daily Cal includes race and equity reporting and a semester as a deputy news editor. Through her journalism, Emewodesh hopes to raise awareness on issues that underrepresented communities face and use it to celebrate their successes.
She learned about the Dow Jones News Fund (DJNF) internships early in college. “I know they usually partner you with an organization that aligns with the work that you’re doing. Oakland Voices definitely aligns with a lot of the work I’m passionate about with its focus on community journalism,” she said.
As the audience engagement intern, she is leading efforts to develop our social media strategy, optimize stories on our website, and craft a campaign to celebrate Oakland Voices’ 15 years of storytelling. She added she’s excited for the opportunity to be more creative. “I’m excited to be able to do more audience engagement work. I’ll have the opportunity to be more creative, which is something that I haven’t had the opportunity to explore and just improve on overall,” she said.
Ayah Ali-Ahmad is the 2025 business reporting intern for Oakland Voices. She recently graduated from UC Berkeley with a degree in Digital Media Studies. As a lead beat reporter for The Daily Californian, she covered housing, policy and systemic issues impacting Berkeley communities. She is passionate about community-centered journalism and is committed to telling underreported stories with depth, care, and a focus on economic equity.
“Beyond the opportunity that the Dow Jones fellowship provides, I was really drawn to working in a smaller, mission-driven newsroom in the Bay Area,” she said. Her friends and other local reporters encouraged her to keep her reporting local. She hopes to experience different newsrooms. “Although I’ve reported just down the road, Oakland is its own unique community, and I’m excited for the challenge to stretch my reporting muscles in new ways.”
She also added, “I was also inspired by the Maynard Institute’s history and purpose, as I see myself contributing to community-focused newsrooms like Oakland Voices in the future.”
City and Regional Planning at Berkeley
Andrea Martinez is Community Engagement Coordinator for Oakland Voices. She is focused on engaging the people of Oakland to better understand community information needs and perception of topics reported by news media.
Her internship is a unique collaboration with the College of Environmental Design at UC Berkeley. She was drawn to the internship as an opportunity for practical experience with community-engaged research.
“I’m hoping to understand how information access, especially to written media, influences/shapes organic community formations,” she said.
Andrea will guide Oakland Voices through an Information Ecosystem Analysis using the Listening Post Collective’s DIY Civic Media Playbook.
Her interest in what audiences want and need stems from an undergraduate background in cultural studies. A first-generation Venezuelan-American pursuing a Master’s degree in City and Regional Planning at UC Berkeley, she researches equitable community building in the context of climate displacements, artificial intelligence, and economic geographies of wealth inequality. Andrea hopes the internship will improve her community organizing skills, relationship-building, and provide experiences of facilitating.
Expanding the Oakland Voices team
Before this summer, Oakland Voices had one part-time staff member, program director Rasheed Shabazz. He will supervise the team this summer.
“I am excited to grow our team and expand the capacity of Oakland Voices this summer,” Shabazz said. “We have a dynamic and thoughtful group of young leaders. Their work will influence the program and how we serve the people of Oakland well beyond 2025.”
This is the first time Oakland Voices, a program of the Maynard Institute, has offered internships. These internships are being funded through grants from Press Forward and the San Francisco Foundation.
Please welcome our first interns.
More info:
- Dow Jones News Fund
- Maynard Institute
- City and Regional Planning at Berkeley
- Listening Post Collective
Editor’s Note: Rasheed Shabazz is a graduate of UC Berkeley’s Department of City and Regional Planning.
Be the first to comment