Tasha Elizarde is a producer and audience engagement specialist at KTOO Public Media who has focused on strengthening coverage of Filipinos in Alaska. She is the executive producer of Mga Kuwento, an award-winning podcast series, historical exhibit, and celebration. Elizarde is also a co-founder of Mana LLC, an Alaska-based media collective reclaiming, preserving, and telling the history of Filipinos. She has produced features, hosted talk shows, and advised her newsroom’s AAPI coverage for the past two years. Elizarde graduated with a degree in History, Business, and Asian Pacific American studies from Mount Holyoke College. Leveraging her background in community advocacy, she has paved a nontraditional route to journalism that emphasizes community engagement, forging a model for coverage of underrepresented communities.

ABOUT THE RECIPIENT: Tasha Elizarde has changed the course of Filipino American coverage in Alaska since joining the KTOO newsroom in June 2022. Initially hired as a community reporting fellow to support KTOO’s efforts to amplify Filipino American voices in Alaska media, Elizarde emerged as a leading voice for Filipino Americans.

At KTOO, Elizarde has published news features — including on the election of Alaska’s second-ever Filipino legislator — hosted a monthly talk show about modern Asian American cuisine, edited content for a ReVision Alaska documentary about a Filipino-run restaurant, and delegated story ideas for coverage during Filipino American History Month in 2023.  

Elizarde was born and raised in Juneau, the capital of a state with one of the largest per capita Filipino populations. Yet, their stories are largely unrecorded — there is only one major publication documenting Filipino American history in Alaska, a book published in 1996. Six months after joining KTOO, Elizarde directed the production of “Mga Kuwento” to document unrecorded stories in a podcast and a historical museum exhibit.

The podcast and exhibit launched with a three-day celebration that brought together 1,000 people to hear Filipino American stories. As part of “Mga Kuwento,” Elizarde revitalized a physical archive at Alaska’s only Filipino Community Hall and created an educational website, all to share untold stories from Juneau’s Filipino community. 

As executive producer of “Mga Kuwento,” Elizarde managed 10 producers and editors, many without experience in podcast or culture reporting, creating relationships between KTOO and the Filipino community still used for other reporting. The fie-episode podcast series received approximately 16,000 downloads in its first month, equivalent to more than half of Juneau’s population.

Wanting to reach new audiences, Elizarde used other platforms to share these stories. She curated the first museum exhibit to center Filipino-American history in her hometown. She created a website to archive the project and other Filipino American stories for educational institutions to use in their curricula. 

Beyond her contributions at KTOO, Elizarde is equally committed to increasing Filipino representation in the media. She co-founded Mana, a media collective that creatively records and shares untold stories in Alaska. Mana launched in October 2023 after the collective released a photo and text exhibit illustrating stories of Filipino elders around Alaska.

Before Elizarde’s efforts, coverage of Filipinos in Alaska was scarce. With her leadership,  Alaska has seen an increase in stories of both quality and quantity about Filipino Americans that will live on for the next generation.

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