Our latest stretch brought the Roadshow to Northern California, where journalists, organizers, elected officials, students, and community members came together for conversations about press freedom, disinformation, institutional trust, organizing under pressure, and what it takes to build durable democratic power.
We began in Chico, in a beautiful and fitting setting: the historic Bidwell Bowl Amphitheater overlooking Big Chico Creek. Local organizations including Chico Peace Alliance, Indivisible Chico, Chico Democratic Socialists of America, and NorCal Resist joined us, bringing together members of the local Defenders of Democracy Coalition. Chico City Councilmember Addison Winslow welcomed the crowd, and Catalina Sanches, the first Latina councilwoman in the nearby town of Gridely, moderated our opening conversation on Journalism at Risk.
Local journalists from ChicoSol and the Chico Enterpris-Record spoke candidly about the challenges of producing trustworthy local journalism with limited resources while competing with an ever-growing ecosystem of misinformation. Their conversation raised questions that have followed us throughout this Roadshow: How do people know what to trust? What responsibility does journalism have when confidence in public institutions is declining? And how can reporters rebuild trust without simply becoming advocates for those institutions?
Afterward, around 70 participants shared lunch together at Chico State, where local organizations hosted a small democracy fair and attendees had a chance to meet, exchange ideas, and learn more about organizing happening in the region.
The afternoon turned toward lessons from Latin America.
Our Roadshow speakers brought their own experiences confronting corruption, disinformation, weakened institutions, and threats to democratic participation. Ernesto Ledesma spoke about building independent investigative journalism through Rompeviento TV and the risks journalists face when official sources themselves cannot always be trusted. Omar Trejo reflected on his experience working as a special prosecutor on the case of the 43 disappeared Ayotzinapa students in Mexico and the institutional barriers he encountered as evidence pointed toward military involvement.
Mynor Alonzo shared another side of the story: what becomes possible when people organize. Drawing from his experience with FOCO and Guatemala’s recent political history, he described how years of corruption and declining civic participation were interrupted by an explosion of student-led protest and renewed public engagement.
The stories were different, but the thread connecting them was clear: democracy cannot depend on institutions repairing themselves. It requires people who are willing to investigate, organize, document what is happening, and build enough collective power to demand accountability.
The Chico program ended with local organizations sharing their own work and the room joining together in chants of “The people united will never be divided” and “El pueblo unido jamás será vencido.”
From Chico, the Roadshow continued to Sacramento, where we gathered at the Communications Workers of America union hall.
Rather than beginning with a traditional panel, each Roadshow speaker had time to tell the story of what brought them into this work. The conversation quickly moved toward a fundamental question: What do we actually mean when we talk about democracy, and how do we distinguish democratic culture from authoritarianism?
Mynor reminded the group that democracy is ultimately built through community. Just as the family can be a nucleus of social life, he argued, community can become the nucleus of democracy. At a time when social-media algorithms increasingly shape what people see, care about, and engage with, rebuilding democratic life means creating real relationships and communities strong enough to compete with those forces.
Ernesto returned to the importance of documentation. Investigative journalism, he argued, requires us not simply to put personalities or influencers at the center of the story, but to document what is actually happening on the ground, in our communities and internationally.
And the Sacramento gathering itself reflected the diversity of organizing across Northern California. Participants included people who had traveled from El Dorado County, candidates organizing in the deeply conservative community of Paradise, a longtime Sacramento DSA organizer, and people connected to the California Trade Justice Coalition.
Across these California gatherings, one message kept resurfacing: democracy is not simply something we inherit or something institutions preserve for us. It is something people create together.
It is built through local journalism that keeps communities informed. Through organizers willing to work in places where organizing is difficult. Through people documenting abuses that others would prefer remain unseen. And through the relationships that make collective action possible in the first place.
That is exactly what the Democracy Defenders Roadshow is trying to strengthen: connections across movements, communities, and borders so that people confronting authoritarianism and democratic erosion do not have to do that work alone.
The Roadshow continues from here to North Carolina and Georgia, carrying the stories, strategies, and relationships built in the Midwest, East Coast and California into our next stops.
You can learn more about the roadshow, speakers, and upcoming events here and make sure to follow us on social media @globalexchange for updates and footage from the events.