Daysi Calavia-Robertson had already established herself as a reporter covering beats ranging from affordable housing to the business of CBD when she was offered the chance to become a columnist for New Jersey’s Star-Ledger newspaper.

She was eager for the new opportunity, vowing to figure it out along the way.

“But it was very different because it was opinion. And when you’re going to school and the early formation of a journalist it’s beaten to us: You have to be objective. You can’t be biased,” she said. “When you make that transition from being a traditional reporter to now having to write opinion where it’s all about what you think. It’s all about your perspective. It’s all about your lived experience. Then it’s a very drastic shift.”

Calavia-Robertson had just shouldered this new responsibility when she joined the first National Press Foundation Widening the Pipeline Fellowship class for early career journalists of color in March of 2022, as one of 25 journalists from around the U.S. For a full year, she participated in virtual and in-person trainings led by seasoned journalists from across the spectrum of newsroom careers, including executive editors, investigative reporters, cable news and network anchors, beat reporters and more. She was also paired with an acclaimed journalist as her mentor: veteran New Orleans Times-Picayune columnist and former National Association of Black Journalists president Will Sutton.

For Calavia-Robertson, the timing was perfect. “I said, ‘well, if I’m going to make this work and if I’m going to make this commitment, then I have some learning to do and I need to get the expertise of a group that again, I trust.’ And what better group than the National Press Foundation to give me that instruction and to reaffirm for me that I can do this, I should do this, my voice does matter.”

In the two years since that first training, Calavia-Robertson has produced award-winning columns exploring a range of topics in her New Jersey community. Her expertise in affordable housing fueled her columns about a single mother facing homelessness due to proposed ordinances restricting stays in local motels.

“Imagine being a mom and you’re in this situation, which is already difficult, not having a permanent home. And then you all of a sudden, every two weeks have to pick up your children, pick up all your stuff, and move to another hotel in the area. Another place to live. And so I wrote about the issue. But I wrote it through her eyes, through the eyes of this one woman, this one single mother telling her story, what she was going through with her two little children.”

The story resonated because Calavia-Robertson has two young children, and her experiences as a mother inform her work as much as her own story as the daughter of a Nicaraguan mother and Spanish father raised in Miami.

“I grew up believing you couldn’t be a Latino, not a real one anyway, without speaking Spanish. It’s what as a child I was told again and again by my immigrant parents, it’s what I must have heard, more than a thousand times from my own mother’s lips. Every time I begrudgingly sat down at the dining table to complete the afternoon Spanish lesson she had prepared for me. She made it clear she wouldn’t be like those other Latinos who didn’t teach their kids Spanish. The possibility that I may one day not know how to roll my R’s … that would be a big embarrassment. And not just for her, but for our entire family. ‘Remember,’ she would say proudly, ‘We are Latinos.’”

Calavia-Robertson also wrote a column about passing that commitment on to her own children. She says her main goal as a columnist is to communicate authentically about the experiences of the whole community, and to pay it forward regarding her own career accomplishments. Challenges and all, Calavia-Robertson said opening a new door in her career has been successful.

“That really opened my eyes to this level of privilege that I have and this power that I have. And I said, I’m not going to let this go like water through my fingers. I’m going to seize this and I’m going to make the most of it. For me and for all those people who came before me who couldn’t make that dream come true, I want to make that dream come true for me and for them, and for you guys. For whoever else to come that wants to do that, and so that they can know that they can.”

Access the full transcript here.

The Widening the Pipeline Fellowship is sponsored by the Evelyn Y. Davis Foundation and Lenovo. NPF is solely responsible for the content.