Exclusive: Meet Maura Healey's multicultural media director
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Photo courtesy: Josh Qualls
Valentina Amaro has built a career out of creating space at predominantly English-speaking institutions for people who speak Spanish, Haitian Creole and other languages commonly spoken in Massachusetts households.
What’s happening: : Now, she’s the new multicultural media director for Gov. Healey’s office, working to bridge the gap between state initiatives and immigrant communities who benefit from them the most.
Why it matters: More than a half million people in Massachusetts speak another language at home, per census data.
The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the health and economic disparities immigrants and people of color face, including barriers to getting unemployment benefits on a clunky, English-only website.
Zoom in: The Venezuelan native helped create a bilingual magazine at Emerson College, promoted the state health connector on Telemundo during the 2022 World Cup and developed the multilingual communications strategy for former Gov. Charlie Baker’s COVID-19 vaccination campaign.
Amaro is the first to hold this new role under Healey, though a similar position existed under then-Gov. Deval Patrick. (Josiane Martinez, founder of ASG, held this role and then worked in the Office for Refugees and Immigrants before starting the company.)
So far, Amaro says she wants to focus on health equity and the ramp-up of the expanded driver’s license law, which takes effect in July.
What’s next: One of the first things the Healey administration wants to pursue with multicultural media is a series of roundtables with state leaders.
- “I think that’s one of the reasons why this position was created … to give the attention that is needed and necessary and that they deserve” to multilingual media, Amaro tells Axios.