Overview: California State University, San Bernardino hosted a 2025 Social Justice Summit focused on digital advocacy and providing students with the knowledge and resources to use digital tools for social justice work. The Solutions Journalism and Social Justice panel featured local journalists and experts who discussed how to approach solutions journalism and navigating objectivity and advocacy in reporting. The experts shared their knowledge with the students, aspiring journalists, faculty and campus community in attendance. The summit highlighted the importance of using data to advocate for change and the need for mainstream outlets to publish disaggregated data by race.
Alyssah Hall
California State University, San Bernardino hosted a 2025 Social Justice Summit, “From Hashtags to Action: Turning Online Momentum into Real-World Impact,” focused on digital advocacy and providing students with the knowledge and resources to use digital tools for social justice work.
The Solutions Journalism and Social Justice panel featured local journalists and experts who discussed how to approach solutions journalism and navigating objectivity and advocacy in reporting.
The conversation was moderated by Thomas Corrigan, professor of CSUSB’s Dept. of Communication and Media and coordinator on CSUSB’s local journalism partnerships initiative.
The panel featured Alicia Ramirez, founder and publisher of The Riverside Record, Candice Mays project director of Black Voice News’ Mapping Black California, Christopher Salazar, reporter at The Frontline Observer, Lacey Kendall, CSUSB lecturer and host of Education Insight, and Madison Aument, reporter at KVCR 91.9.
In 2013, the Solutions Journalism Network was founded by award-winning journalists David Bornstein, Tina Rosenberg and Courtney Martin.
Solutions journalism reports on the issue but also offers an answer to the problem or brings attention to the issue so that a solution can eventually be found.
The experts also shared their knowledge with the students, aspiring journalists, faculty and campus community in attendance.
Ramirez shared a story with the audience about her recent coverage of the Riverside Unified School District (RUSD) Board of Education’s parental notification policy. This policy would have required school officials to “out” transgender and non-binary children to their families. Ramirez explained that the policy was never enacted, but it was a policy report that was adopted last March by Chino Valley Unified School District (CVUSD).
Ramirez approached the story by first breaking down what that kind of policy does, and then reached out to people who work with transgender and non-binary youth to get a deeper understanding of the possible consequences.
“The science says that if we are able to put these folks into spaces that are affirming, that are caring, that are loving, that are non judgmental, their rates of depression and suicide actually go down to the baseline, and so that is a solution that folks are missing out on,” Ramirez said.
“Parents deserve to know what’s going on with their children, and absolutely, they do. But when your child is at risk for all of these harms, it is better when we present solutions that respect the rights for parents and also respect the rights of the youth,” Ramirez continued.
Another panelist, Aument, shared a story she reported regarding an officer-involved shooting in San Bernardino in 2022 where two police officers shot and killed Rob Adams, a 23-year old Black man.
“In California, if there’s an officer involved shooting, the departments are supposed to release the names of the officers that were involved. And by December of 2022, so almost six months later, the police department had not released the names of these officers. The family of Rob Adams was suing the department,”Aument said.
At the time, Aument was reporting for KVCR news, but made multiple public records requests with a team of reporters and one of those requests yielded two names of the officers. The request didn’t confirm that those names were the officers involved, so Aument and her team had to confirm with the police department. The department confirmed the names. Adams’ family didn’t know the names of those two officers until KVCR confirmed it and the attorneys for Adams’ family were able to add the names of those officers to the lawsuit.
Adams’ family was awarded $4 million, although they recognized that the money could not replace their son’s life. Aument shared that this was a big moment for her because it was a moment of not only advocacy work, but also holding institutions accountable.
“I fully consider myself an advocate. We also talked about being objective. I am a Black person who works for Black newspaper with a Black audience. So while the data is what the data is, we’re talking about Black people and what’s happening to Black people. Take that how you want,” Mays said.
Mays talked about the spread of COVID-19 misinformation and the myths about Black people not being able to contract COVID-19. Much of the data available during the beginning of the pandemic, however, was not disaggregated by race.
“Mainstream outlets were publishing these dashboards that were talking about infection rates and things of that nature, but the data was not showing what was happening in particular communities. We were the first newsroom in the country to disaggregate COVID-19 data by race in order to examine the impacts of COVID-19 on Black workers in the state,” Mays explained
“We found out that Black people are actually more likely to contract COVID-19 because we’re more likely to be frontline workers, and we were more likely to live in multi-generational housing,” Mays said.
When the fear around COVID-19 subsided, the state stopped publishing worker data, disaggregated by race, and as a result, Mays and her team had to depreciate their dashboard.
“We were asked to do an academic peer review, and we had to explain to the journal digital humanities review [that] we had to change this a little bit to update it for you, because the data is not available,” Mays said.
About a month after the peer review, Mays had a private audience with Attorney General Rob Bonta in October of 2022 and informed him that Mapping Black California had to depreciate a dashboard because the state stopped publishing disaggregated data by race on workers. In the beginning of 2024, a bill was passed mandating that employee worker data be disaggregated by race in the state of California.
“More important than making maps is advocating for access to the data because without the data, you don’t have a map. We now see, even if you’re not a data scientist, how important that information is because the federal government is systematically deleting all of the data so you don’t have access to it,” Mays said.
“I view solution journalism as not the solution itself, but the vehicle that leads readers and other people to be able to identify solutions,” Mays continued.