The SPEL team wraps up the spring 2025 semester!
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(screenshot by Francisco Rodriguez)
¡Hasta luego (see you later)! As we approach the beginning of summer, we have just said goodbye to Hola Cultura’s spring 2025 Storytelling Program for Experiential Learning (SPEL) semester.
On April 29, over two dozen interns and fellows celebrated the end of another successful semester of storytelling, professional development and hands-on journalism experience. The last meeting saw the cohort put what they’ve learned to the test over a game of SPEL trivia, and as is now SPEL tradition, everyone unmuted their mics and said goodbye to one another for the last time.
This spring, high school and college interns worked across four teams to report, write, edit and promote stories for Hola Cultura: the Arts and Humanities, Society and Culture, Copy Editing and Social Media teams. One or two fellows guided each team’s interns during weekly story lab sessions and helped them sharpen their skills through skill-building assignments.
Eduardo Coyotzi Zarate, a communications associate at Rails to Trails Conservancy who joined SPEL as a fellow during the summer 2024 session, led this semester’s Arts and Humanities team. This session was his last semester as a yearlong SPEL fellow. He says he’s enjoyed witnessing each cohort develop their skills each semester over the past year with the program.
“Even within one semester, you see the growth of these young professionals learning about journalism, and I also get to see their own writing skills expand and their interview skills grow,” he says. “That’s probably my favorite part of the whole thing: getting to see where these young people start and where they end once the semester is over, or once they decide to move forward.”
This spring, the Arts and Humanities team had three high school student interns, which Coyotzi Zarate says presented a “cool challenge” for him. He says he enjoyed aiding these interns through the reporting process, adding that he gained valuable management skills.
“Working with the high school students was really a learning experience for me, and an interesting experience to do, because high school students require a little bit more guidance, oversight and management,” Coyotzi Zarate says. “Working with all of them was cool because they had a lot of interesting ideas, and they’re so fresh in the journalism space. It was nice for me to be challenged.”
Various guest speakers spoke to this spring’s SPEL cohort. Included were Carola Fuentes, a Chilean journalist and Emmy-nominated documentary filmmaker; Paula Moura, a Brazilian-born multimedia investigative journalist; Lucia Matamoros, a Colombian journalist; Gisell Ramírez, a former intern who is working to update our D.C. Latin Murals Map this year; Connie Moore, a communications and events coordinator at the Aspen Institute’s Aspen Policy Academy; and Paige Holman, a Mexico-based grant writer and marketing assistant. These visits allowed interns and fellows to gain insight into a career in journalism and ask experts in the field career-related questions.
Marina Caraballo, a first-year student at American University studying international studies, joined the SPEL program this semester and worked on the Society and Culture team. As a writer for “El Aguila,” the Spanish section of American University’s student-run newspaper, “The Eagle,” Carballo said she was captivated by the SPEL program’s ability to let her explore journalism outside of a university setting.
“I got to do my own background research, conduct my own interviews and write my own story from start to finish,” Carballo says. “It was great.”
Carballo’s story this semester, which will be published soon, centers around the Central American Resource Center (CARECEN), a community-based organization in the District that seeks to help develop the city’s Central American and immigrant community through empowerment, solidarity and resource allocation. She says highlighting the organization “felt important” with the beginning of President Donald Trump’s second administration and its immigration policy.
“A lot of what I found out with that project was how funding had been impacted with the freezing of a lot of reviewing of funds by the Trump Administration and how individuals on the ground were impacted,” Carballo says. “That meant, for me, interviewing clients at CARECEN, hearing their stories and attempting to humanize those in my article.”
As the semester closes, Carballo advises next semester’s cohort to embrace the community one gains by working with SPEL.
“Reach out to as many people on your team as possible,” Carballo says. “They can be a really good resource to help you find sources … Just using your network to help better and improve your story is something I would say.”
Thank you to this semester’s SPEL interns, fellows and guest speakers for contributing to another successful session! We can’t wait for the start of the summer session, which will run from May 27 to July 29, 2025. Applications are now open, so please apply if interested!
– Story by Francisco Rodriguez
– Copy edited by Samantha Gonzalez and Kami Waller
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