Juana Ponce de León
Juana Ponce de León is Executive Director at UN@75! NYC, a program that identifies and honors community leaders worldwide who have developed successful models to resolve local issues aligned with the UN’s 11th Sustainable Development Goal: Sustainable Cities and Communities, and are worthy of sharing with an international cohort of peers.
Her many years in publishing, the nonprofit arena and government have been dedicated to ensuring a cultural conversation inclusive of the myriad voices representing the diversity of American society. Translation has been the centerpiece of that work, making accessible to readers a wealth of perspectives beyond their language. She was founding editor of Siete Cuentos Editorial, the first US Spanish-language imprint launched by Seven Stories Press, which debuted with Nuestros cuerpos, nuestras vidas, the seminal feminist text Our Bodies, Ourselves, and created the Está en tus manos series to provide easy-to-understand health, immigration and labor information to NY’s Latinx communities.
She is an award-winning editor of Voices That Must Be Heard, the first online publication disseminated to local government, academia, foundations and advocacy groups, offering coverage in the ethnic media translated into English. She headed the Independent Press Association NY and is the former Executive Director at New York Community Media Alliance, nonprofit organizations dedicated to bolstering the journalistic expertise of ethnic and community media – a sector that reaches over 4 million New Yorkers – and its inclusion in the government’s information loop.
As the first Director of Media Diversity Relations for NY City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito, she developed tools and strategies to facilitate Council-wide outreach as a standard to ethnic and community news outlets, while establishing and managing the practice of releasing Speaker’s press communications in multiple languages, including Spanish, to broaden her messaging to hard-to-reach communities.
She serves on the board of Adelante Alliance and the Advisory Board at F.Y. Eye.
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