LA promotoras are powering voter outreach as funding challenges threaten their future

Promotoras knock on doors and table in their own neighborhoods, transforming lived experience into civic power and reaching voters others miss.

Fewer than 30 percent of eligible voters in LA County cast a ballot in the last primary election.

This year, Ana Guzman is trying to push that pattern in a different direction. As she balances the demands of her children and managing an ongoing immigration case, the Southeast LA mother of five is helping ask questions for an upcoming LA City Attorney Candidate forum ahead of the coming primary election. 

“Every vote makes a difference, and each vote counts,” Guzman said in Spanish.

Guzman is one of thousands of promotoras fanning out across LA County, drawing on a community-health model born in rural Mexico in the 1960s, where trust is built not by institutions, but by familiar faces at the door.  

In LA, the approach has evolved into something broader: a trusted, hyperlocal form of civic engagement rooted in lived experience. Often wearing bright neon vests, promotoras canvass around neighborhoods or table at community-centered events, like the upcoming “We Love Boyle Heights” event on April 24. Promotoras, many who are mothers or grandmothers ineligible to vote, begin conversations with everyday concerns like rent, food, and school meetings before gradually introducing information about elections. Some even coordinate candidate forums. 

With the June primary approaching, their presence may help determine who shows up to vote. But funding concerns are putting long-standing civic engagement at risk. 

According to Betsy Hernandez, advocacy coordinator for community engagement with Vision y Compromiso, a national network supporting promotoras in underserved communities, promotoras distribute voter registration materials at community events, including health clinics and mobile outreach sites, as part of their “Get Out the Vote” campaign. Building on the promotora model, the campaign mobilizes promotoras to use peer-to-peer outreach to increase civic participation.

“We know that even if someone can’t vote, they can still encourage other people to vote,” Hernandez said.

Dalia Velasco, director of strategy with Alliance for a Better Community, said their promotoras knocked on more than 13,000 doors in Whittier as part of Somos el Voto, a civic engagement and policy impact program powered by the Alliance for a Better Community Action Fund.

“We have a really strong base in Southeast LA, but we’ve started building our community leaders in the San Fernando Valley, like Sun Valley and Pacoima,” Velasco said, adding that promotoras ensure that underrepresented voices are heard, including Indigenous voices.

“Across LA, we have promotoras who do outreach in Indigenous languages from Mexico and Guatemala,” Velasco added.

The promotora model has even been integrated into LA’s community healthcare systems, including AltaMed Health Services Corp., a nonprofit community health provider serving Latino and underrepresented populations. AltaMed also runs an extensive civic outreach program, “My Vote. My Health.,” which launched in 2018 and now operates 14 voting centers in LA within  local clinics.

“We’re all over LA, but we’re especially in Southeast LA,” said Lizette Escobedo, vice president of government affairs and civic engagement at AltaMed.

AltaMed has also piloted a campaign called “White Coats for Change,” pairing volunteer doctors with promotoras, sending them into neighborhoods to help demystify voter registration and break down what’s on upcoming ballots.The model traces back to AltaMed’s founding in the 1960s, when the Brown Berets established the East LA Barrio Free Clinic amid the Chicano civil rights movement to address health inequities in East LA. CEO Cástulo de la Rocha, a longtime advocate and former Brown Beret, has carried forward the belief that clinical care alone cannot overcome the structural barriers shaping life in low-income communities.

“If we’re addressing whole-person health, we should also be addressing civic health,” said  Escobedo.

LA promotoras bring lived experience into leadership

Every promotora enters the work differently. For Ana Guzman, it began in 2006 at Normandy Elementary, her children’s school in South LA, when she noticed Spanish-speaking parents were missing critical information about their children’s education during meetings. Translation existed, she said, but key details were lost.

“I saw that the information parents really needed wasn’t reaching them,” she said. “So I volunteered to translate.”

That act of volunteerism became her entry point into a broader civic role. Years later, she joined Visión y Compromiso, a statewide promotora network of roughly 4,000 promotoras. 

“We bring our light together so it shines brighter,” Guzman said, holding back tears as she traced the journey that brought her to that point.

They are usually middle-aged immigrant women or mothers who have learned, out of necessity, how to fight for a doctor’s appointment or a school meeting,” said Escobedo. Those daily battles, she said, have made them fluent in systems, survival, and persuasion.

Over time, promotoras have become the connective tissue linking communities to the ballot.

“I saw that my community didn’t have access to many resources,” said promotora Katy Meza in Spanish. “I wanted to learn and share my knowledge, especially with other mothers like me,” adding that issues affecting her community could be decided at the polls.

For nearly a decade, Meza has focused on voter education and civic participation in Southeast LA as a promotora with Alliance for a Better Community. “We don’t tell them who to choose,” she said. “We want them to make their own decisions.”

LA’s promotora networks are being replicated 

Similar approaches are now being studied and replicated by other health systems and universities, including UCLA, UC Riverside, and Loyola Marymount University.

At Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, integrating promotoras from the Community Transformation Collective into social work teams in 2020 increased the number of successful connections to basic services from 26 percent to more than 85 percent, according to program leaders. “The funding for the promotora program at CHLA ended in 2025, but we still partner with them,” said Brenda Aguilera, director of the Community Transformation Collective at Para Los Niños.

Community Transformation Collective is an LA-based collaborative working with communities and institutions to shift public health and social systems toward equity and resident-led solutions. Para Los Niños is an LA nonprofit that provides education, early childhood development, mental health, and family support services for low-income communities.

“The point is to position community members in decision-making spaces,” said Aguilera, adding that their network has grown to more than 1,000 residents, including promotoras, and 200 partner organizations across LA.

Expansion and funding uncertainty

The Trump administration’s health funding decisions have had direct downstream effects on promotora-style outreach, mainly through cuts that support community healthcare workers and trust-based outreach.

“We haven’t been impacted directly by federal funding cuts, but it’s a growing challenge with other funding streams,” Velasco said, noting that foundations are pulling back from long-term investments in community engagement.

Organizations that LA Public Press reached out to said that it’s too early to know the real impact of the shift in funding, but all are moving forward cautiously.

“Even for organizations that don’t receive funds directly from the federal government, it’s created a domino effect on foundations, so it’s unfortunately a constant battle for nonprofits,” said Velasco, but noted that Alliance for a Better Community has been around for over 25 years, giving them experience on how to navigate funding challenges.

Aguilera points to a broader trend: resources are being redirected toward more immediate or traditional priorities like housing and food security, often at the expense of racial justice and relationship-based models, like the promotora model.

“There’s a lot of hesitancy,” said Lizette Escobedo, vice president of government affairs and civic engagement at AltaMed. In some cases, community-centered organizations have scrubbed their websites of DEI language amid fears of funding repercussions, and AltaMed has conducted an internal review of its website to identify any DEI-related language that could jeopardize federal funding. Other nonprofits have already lost funding.

Promotoras are more cautious in a climate of fear

In addition to funding pressures, promotoras in communities affected by immigration enforcement said they are being more cautious. “There’s skepticism that wasn’t there before,” Aguilera said.

When LA Public Press first spoke with Aguilera, she expected to connect LA Public Press with promotoras willing to share this experience easily. Instead, she encountered an unexpected silence. Not one agreed to speak.

Promotoras from the Community Transformation Collective, Aguilera said, have adapted to concerns from promotoras and community members by shifting meetings online, using WhatsApp groups, and maintaining phone-based check-ins. These changes are built on infrastructure developed during the pandemic.

Risk is recalibrated as they go, said Velasco. Attendance fluctuates. Some leaders pull back from in-person work; others press forward.

“Everyone has a different level of risk that they’re willing to take,” she said, recalling a promotora who described skipping work or keeping a child home from school after hearing about nearby immigration raids.

“Goals, dreams, and basic needs don’t change,” Velasco said, adding that knowing how to adapt is a form of survival. 

Participation and persistence under pressure

As immigration enforcement has reshaped fieldwork conditions, promotora Katy Meza paused her outreach work for two months, starting in June of last year due to the persistent news of violent federal immigration raids throughout LA.

“I have two children,” she said. “They worry — what if my mom leaves and doesn’t come back?”

She eventually returned to volunteer work in September, working alongside other promotoras in teams and carrying safety tools, such as whistles. Encounters with hostility, including racist remarks, are not uncommon.

“We had a couple of canvassers go and knock on the doors of folks who were ICE themselves,” Velasco said. The agents, she added, “sort of outed themselves through the conversation.”

According to Meza, the encounter with ICE occurred when two promotoras were canvassing in Maywood for Prop 50. “He said he was against Prop. 50 and that he was a Trump supporter and an ICE agent,” Meza said.

Still, they continued.

The LA promotora model is a fragile infrastructure with lasting stakes

Despite challenges, Escobedo notes an unexpected trend: growing participation by younger volunteers, including medical students, in canvassing and advocacy efforts, inspired by promotoras’ community outreach.

“You know, we’ve continued to really hold the line, we’re here to serve Latino communities, and we’re really unapologetic about that,” Velasco said.

“It’s almost like fuel,” Hernandez said, referring to the constant pressures promotoras face. “Seeing the injustice, they want to keep going and advocating.”

For Meza, the decision is clear.

“If we want to see change, we have to be part of it,” Meza said. “Staying home won’t solve the problems.”