I am Milan Varia, a journalist from Lansdale, Pennsylvania. I am creating a newsroom dedicated to covering people of color with disabilities, and it’s called The Equity Echo.

The Equity Echo is addressing the coverage gap that is faced by people of color with disabilities and creating meaningful stories that serve them, answer their questions and provide them with genuine information that can shape their day-to-day lives and decisions.

Over the past 20 months, I have worked on building ths newsroom. I created a business plan that contained my mission statements, research assessments of the nonprofit industry, products and services, marketing strategies, revenue streams, market and competitors analysis, and a SWOT analysis. With this business plan and a written grant proposal, the organization was awarded a $3,500 grant to begin operations. Since then, I’ve spent time working with different journalists to test out ideas, took time to assess their gaps and identify training needs and developed a curriculum for my organization to educate reporters.

Building this organization strengthened my ability to find unusual stories and cultivated my community engagement skills, and I look forward to taking this year to seriously build the newsroom. Admittedly, I am still learning as I go and gaining new experiences every day, but I’ve done a lot of work to get to where I am today.

I am also the Curt Chandler Storytelling Fellow with The News Lab at Penn State, working on telling the story of the Indigenous students who attended boarding schools in Carlisle and Martinsburg. Previously, I’ve interned with The Philadelphia Inquirer and Bucks County Courier Times, and I worked at The Daily Collegian as a Lifestyle Editor, Investigative Reporter and Student Life Reporter. My work has also is published in outlets like LehighValleyNews, WPSU and PennLive.

Contact me: milan.a.varia@gmail.com