Using WhatsApp to foster dialogue: A Q&A with Conecta Arizona

Conecta Arizona launched on WhatsApp during the coronavirus pandemic as a source of vetted information about COVID-19. Now Founder Maritza L. Félix and her team host a daily interactive chat session called Cafecito on WhatsApp. The organization also recently launched Plumas Invitadas, a training program for community storytellers.

Félix talked with INN about her community-focused programming and the things she has learned serving border communities. This Q&A has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

INN: Tell us about Conecta Arizona. What is your primary mission?

Maritza Félix: We were born in 2020, in the middle of the pandemic. My mom was on the Mexican side of the border, and I was here. She’s the real queen of WhatsApp. Every single morning, and still now, she sends me prayers and memes and whatever she finds online.

I started doing fact-checking for her during the pandemic because she was sharing everything that she found or that people were forwarding to her. We started with a very, very small WhatsApp group of family and close friends. I grew when we started sharing the link to our “conocidos” [acquaintances] and in our social media. That WhatsApp group is still the heart of Conecta Arizona.

INN: Who is your primary audience?

Félix: It’s for Spanish speakers in the border region. At the beginning, it was basically Arizona and Mexico, but we have grown and we have community members in different countries in Latin America. But primarily, what local means to us is Phoenix, Tucson, Nogales — the border region. Now we’re getting to rural communities and the Mexican side of it. We have a community correspondent in Sonora now. 

We are knowledgeable about who they are because we have daily conversations on WhatsApp. It’s people who are bilingual, people who go back and forth across the border, or they have a connection that can actually cross the border even if they cannot for any reason. They’re well-educated. We reach a lot of people who have a bachelor’s degree and up. That was very interesting for us.

Our mission is to bring back dialogue to journalism. 

INN: What have you learned from the Cafecitos? What have been the biggest successes out of that? 

Félix: The Cafecitos are our listening tool for our community and where we embrace this commitment to two-way communication with our communities. Our mission is to bring back dialogue to journalism. 

Every afternoon from 2 to 3 p.m., we chat with our community. We talk about politics. We talk about health and money and things that are not necessarily news all the time. And that’s good because we get to know them a little bit better.

Once a week, we invite an expert to talk about one of the issues that our community tells us is important. I think around 300 experts have joined us in a Cafecito — from a U.S. ambassador to doctors and therapists to pet sitters and essential oils experts.

INN: Tell us about Plumas Invitadas. What led you to launch that?

Félix: We were listening to the community and thought, why don’t we create a program where we teach community members to be community storytellers? If we put all these stories in a box and we open this box in 10 years, we will know exactly what was going on at our border during that time.

And we saw that there was something that there was a lot of interest in. We got some support from the Walton Family Foundation, and we did nine weeks of training. It was training on ethics, how to write your own story, how to use nostalgia to actually inspire the writing that you’re going to do, how to fact-check your own story, and the importance of AI in journalism and in storytelling. 

Twenty of them are going to write for us every single month. They have so many questions as they start writing as a muscle, so we’re going to start a new program, Plumas Graduadas, with one monthly training session for them.

INN: What are the lessons you learned from putting Plumas Invitadas together? 

Félix: There are more people interested in writing stories than opinions. That was something that was very enlightening for me. They want to actually do it the right way, with journalism and fact-checking and sources and interviews. 

There are a lot of people who want to understand how media works and why editorial decisions are made. Now they get why we cover some things and not everything, how to prioritize the stories that are being amplified, and why we don’t amplify all the things. Those are lessons that we’re bringing to, for example, the WhatsApp group. Sometimes they don’t want an answer for things, they don’t want us to fix everything for them. They just need us to hold their hand while they’re finding the solutions themselves. 

INN: It sounds like this first Plumas Invitadas program was very successful. When you look back at the planning stages, are there any lessons you learned or mistakes you’ve made? 

Félix: The good thing about creating safe spaces is people give you real feedback. It’s unfiltered too. One of the things that they told us is, we need to have more structure. And they wanted a longer program, but that’s something that we cannot provide yet because we don’t have the resources to do so. That’s why Plumas Graduales made sense at the end, to keep those questions going after. And we need to update the program to face the new realities of AI.

INN: What advice do you have for engaging a hard-to-reach community, particularly one where few people speak English?

Félix: The first thing is to use the Listening Post Collective playbook. It is so good. They have been my mentors and my coaches since I launched. They have a system, and it works. 

The second thing is to invest in people. Obviously, you need all the infrastructure behind that, but it’s investing money, resources, and time in people. And don’t fall to the pressure to scale as everybody else thinks about scale. You have your own scaling process.

Don’t try to focus on the traditional metrics because that doesn’t help anybody. That didn’t help us. 

INN: What’s next? What are you most excited about for 2025?

Félix: Community building in rural communities. We’re planting the seeds in rural communities. It’s been harder than we thought.  Those rural communities have been so underserved and ignored for so long, especially the Spanish speakers. They have been in the shadows even though they’re legally here, but they don’t want to raise any red flags within their communities because they don’t feel welcome. 

Next year, maybe I’ll spend two days in Yuma a month and just sit down in a cafeteria and say, “These are my Cafecito hours. Come and sit with me and talk to me. What do you need?” No