Berks in the Spotlight

Access to reliable, regional news is the oxygen communities breathe. Local, investigative reporting improves civic engagement and helps residents make informed decisions. Spotlight PA is a nonpartisan, nonprofit dedicated to high-quality investigative journalism for Pennsylvania state government, who launched a Berks Bureau in 2025.

Spotlight PA’s Community Forums Program is an extension of this investigative work. Focused on topics that matter to the community, this interactive and educational program has helped bring the Tec Centro Workforce Network to Berks County.

To subscribe to Spotlight PA’s Berks Bureau newsletter, access free, investigative reporting on Berks County, and attend a Community Forum, visit https://www.spotlightpa.org/berks/. Have a story you’d like to share with Spotlight PA? Visit https://www.spotlightpa.org/tips or call +1 717-418-9684 to submit a tip. To learn more about Berks County Community Foundation, visit https://bccf.org/. You can get in contact with the Community Foundation by emailing us at info@bccf.org or calling 610-685-2223.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to Sparking Change, the official podcast of Burks County Community Foundation. Join us each month to learn about the good work happening in Burks County. Each episode will feature some of the change makers who make our community a better place to live. Opinions expressed in this episode do not necessarily reflect those of Burks County Community Foundation.

SPEAKER_04 0:21

Hello, my name is Monica Reyes. I'm the Vice President for Programs and Initiatives at Burks County Community Foundation. On today's episode titled Burks in the Spotlight, we'll talk with Burks Community Leaders about the importance of local independent news and ways Burks Countyans can stay connected and informed. We have two guests joining us today. Welcome, gentlemen. Can you introduce yourselves, your position or title? And since this podcast is called Burks in the Spotlight, just a favorite thing about Burks County. And Dave, we can start with you.

SPEAKER_01 0:56

I'm Dave Myers. I'm a senior fellow at the Community Foundation, but I'm also working with uh Jose Spotlight Burks on uh community forums.

SPEAKER_03 1:06

And I'm Jose Delgado, I'm the general manager for the local bureau of Spotlight PA. And my favorite thing about Burks County is its people and how close we're to things.

unknown 1:19

Great.

SPEAKER_01 1:23

The people are fantastic asset.

SPEAKER_04 1:25

Yes, they are. So for our listeners who don't know, support for the Berks Bureau of Spotlight PA came from the Hawley and Myrtle Queer Fund of Berks County Community Foundation. This fund was gifted to the foundation and it allows us to respond to emerging community needs and remain flexible in our grant making. We call these types of funds our unrestricted funds. As a community foundation, we know the crucial role of independent and accurate news, how it plays in Berks County, and we believe that an informed citizenry is a healthy one, which is why the foundation, back in 2022, we convened several local and regional media outlets at the time to look at the landscape and the needs of local news in Berks County. Part of those conversations were BCTV, Spotlight PA, the Snyman Communications, WHYY, and WITF to discuss the question: how can we improve local journalism in Berks County? We still had the Reading Eagle, which provided some coverage. We had other media outlets that provided some coverage, but it was clear that we needed another form of accessing local news in the community. And the idea of the Burks News Bureau took off when we saw the success of the State College Bureau. So Spotlight PA was focused on covering statewide news. And then they created a bureau in State College. So the community foundation at the time made a grant to conduct community feasibility study to see if it would make sense to create a Berks County Bureau. So I'll turn it over to Jose, who is the general manager at Spotlight PA, and can talk more about what it is. So, Jose, can you tell our listeners more about Spotlight PA and how you're bringing news to all Berks County residents?

SPEAKER_03 3:18

Thank you, Monica. Spotlight PA is a nonpartisan, nonprofit newsroom dedicated to high-quality investigative and public service journalism for Pennsylvania state government. In 2025, we opened the second regional bureau here in Berks County, and we have a newsletter, a daily newsletter that the audience can subscribe to. It's free. And Mondays we publish all the municipal meeting agendas, municipalities, the county meetings, agendas. On Tuesdays, we share business news. We curate business news. Wednesdays, farming, agriculture, food related news, Thursdays, events, and Fridays we have kind of a summary of the week. People can subscribe to the newsletter by going to our website, spellaipa.org slash Burks, and the newsletter is Good Day Burks. And we focus in three main areas. We have government accountability, both city of Reading and County offices. We have a regional accountability reporter that focuses on other municipalities around the county, and we cover quality of life issues like immigration, housing, social services, those types of topics.

SPEAKER_04 4:38

You mentioned in your introductions, you both mentioned one of the favorite things about Berks County is the people I always enjoy on Saturdays. There's a newsletter that comes out highlighting community members who are doing good work in the community. So I always like to read the Saturday ones as well.

SPEAKER_03 4:57

Yeah. Every other Saturday to a grant from United Way of Berks County, we have community spotlights. We highlight these individuals in the community, not the usual suspects. The first one was a cook at one of our local shelters, a crossguard, students doing work with the environment, those types of individuals we highlight on those newsletters.

SPEAKER_04 5:20

Yeah, it's always great to see. How would you say Spotlight PA is different from other regional media publications?

SPEAKER_03 5:27

As I mentioned, Spotlight PA focuses on high-quality investigative reporting. These are the follow-up questions, digging deeper into stories. And this is a job that takes a lot of resources, both time and money to do. And we're lucky to partner with over 120 other media outlets across the state. And here in Berks County, we partner with Berks Weekly, BCTV, WEEU, and 69 News. And what we do, we provide them with those investigations. We go deeper in the stories, we share the stories with them at no cost. So that is something important. All our content is free, both for the public and our partners. And we complement the job that due to lack of resources, they can't do. It's not that they don't want to do it, it's that it's so expensive and time consuming. So we provide that.

SPEAKER_04 6:18

Can you give us examples of recent stories that you've highlighted?

SPEAKER_03 6:21

Well, here in Berks County, we have plenty of stories. A couple of weeks ago, we published one about who owns the plied buildings in the city of Ready. We broke the news about the warehouse that was purchased by immigration customs enforcement in Upper Burn Township. And we also highlighted programs like the bilingual program that TechCentro is doing for truck drivers. And those are the stories that we're covering here.

SPEAKER_04 6:52

And you said that there are three reporters that are covering these stories.

unknown 6:55

Yes.

SPEAKER_04 6:56

Can you explain what types of stories they've reported on and let the listeners know how they can contact the reporters?

SPEAKER_03 7:03

Yeah, we have three reporters. Hannah Holthouse is our city and county accountability reporter. She goes every week to City Hall and the county offices and does reporting in that area. We have Amanda Fries, she does regional accountability reporting. She has done reporting on the Oli School District, the Antietham School, Upperburn Township, Why You Missing Stories, and Gabriela Martinez, she does quality of life reporting. So she does immigration stories and all that.

SPEAKER_04 7:35

That's great. So you're really able to provide coverage across the county just with those three reporters. It sounds like you're really all around the county.

SPEAKER_03 7:44

It's an uphill work, sort of speak, because again, investigative reporting takes a lot of time. And only three reporters are not enough to cover all the topics that we have here. For example, we have how many school districts in Berks County, and we only have one reporter that is able to cover not only that, but also the municipal meetings and those areas. So we're looking to raise support. And right now we're on a three-year rollout period for the Bureau, but long term we want to add more resources to that team so they can cover more stories. And I apologize, I didn't answer your previous question on where they can find our reporters and our reporting, spotlipa.org slash Burks. There you can read all our stories. And the reporters, if you want to submit a tip, you can go to spotliga.org slash tips, and there you will find a phone number and emails and a form where people can submit story ideas.

SPEAKER_04 8:45

And do they have offices anywhere in the county?

SPEAKER_03 8:48

Spot IPA Burks is the only team of Spotlight brand that has a physical space. We're located in 401 Penn Street at the John Post Center.

SPEAKER_04 8:58

The Alvernia building. The Alvernia Building. Okay. Okay.

SPEAKER_03 9:01

Yeah, we have a space there.

SPEAKER_04 9:02

So you have the three reporters, and then what's your role as the business manager?

SPEAKER_03 9:07

My role is to connect with the community, businesses, sponsors, be the face of Spol IP8 in Burgs, and raise the funds and resources needed for the work that we're doing here.

SPEAKER_04 9:19

Great, great. Before we jump into my next question for Dave, I was going to introduce him, but I told him before the podcast, he has a very long bio, and just reading his bio alone would be an entire podcast. But just know that for anyone who knows Dave, he's just a well-respected community leader, served various senior roles across all government, local, county, state. So we really appreciate you, Dave, being here and being at the community foundation and doing the work that you're leading with the community forums. Can you tell our listeners how the community forums came to be and how it fits into Spotlight PA's mission?

SPEAKER_01 10:00

Sure. Back in 2019, I was working for a group called the Burks Alliance, which was a collaboration of the Anchor institutions, healthcare and educational, higher educational institutions in the county. And we decided that it would be important to focus on issues, organizations that were important or things that were happening here in Berks County, and the lessons we could learn from other communities. And so we started a community forum program. And we would do at least one community forum a month, and then some additional shorter programs that we called spotlight programs, but all highlighting those kinds of things. And there are some very good and important lessons that I'll talk about in a minute about them. But the Berks Alliance folded up two years ago. Thankfully, the Community Foundation decided that community forums were worth continuing, which I thank I appreciate. Thank you. So we did for a year and we ran them under the umbrella of the Community Foundation. And then we moved over to Spotlight PA Burks. And I think that's a real opportunity because it sort of fits into the mission and role that Jose was talking about, talking about important issues in the community, events and organizations that are important to the community, things that need to be addressed in the community, and we can talk about a little bit of those.

SPEAKER_04 11:08

Yeah, the forums are really a good opportunity for members of the community to join, right? It's available to anyone. Anyone can sign up for it.

SPEAKER_01 11:16

Everybody can sign up for it. Okay. And we get somewhere between, I think the lowest we've gotten is about 80 people registering for them. We do them via Zoom largely. We have been doing some early on in real life, and I think we're going to talk about doing a couple more in real life as well, because it's good to see have people see real people. But we record them, people can join, they can watch the video at their leisure. We post them now on the YouTube channel at Spotlight PA Burks, and we share them here with BCTV.

SPEAKER_04 11:45

Great. It really says a lot about the quality of the forums when the listeners have literally followed you from Burks Alliance to the Community Foundation and out to Spotlight PA, like the attendance remains the same or has even gotten higher. So I think that's a testament to the work that you're doing and the topics that are being covered.

SPEAKER_03 12:04

I want to add that the community spotlights, you mentioned at the beginning the feasibility study for Spotlight PA. And one of the things in that study was what were the needs of the community? And as I mentioned, we have a very limited team here in Berks and limited resources to cover all the topics that came up in that study. So the community forums allow us to cover those stories out of the main scope of Word of Spell IPA. So we're grateful for Dave to continue with us hosting them because that way we can cover that specific need of our local community.

SPEAKER_04 12:41

Yeah, that's great. Can you give us some examples of some of the community forums, maybe some of the ones that have been highly attended or some that you feel are really important to highlight?

SPEAKER_01 12:52

Sure. We we started the program and we uh one of the first ones we did was taking lessons from other communities like Lancaster in particular. That put us in touch with Franklin and Marshall College and the hospital in Lancaster and some other things. It put us in touch with Techcentro Lancaster. And a number of things emerged out of that. We had a good relationship with FM, and John Fry was the president of FM. He went on to become president of Drexel. Sometime later, he was looking to where he could locate a hospital outside of the city of Philadelphia and had been thinking about trying to do it in Lancaster. Lancaster General Hospital did an affiliation with University of Pennsylvania Hospital. So because he knew some of the things that were happening here in Berks County, he decided, let's go to Berks County.

SPEAKER_04 13:37

I did not know that.

SPEAKER_01 13:39

That's great. And that's how the Drexel Medical School came about because of that relationship with John Fry. And the same thing, we had conversations with Tech Centro in Lancaster, and we told them at that point Reading was the largest city with a majority Hispanic population, and probably the only one with over 50% of the population was Hispanic. And creating an organization like Tech Centro here in Berks County would be important. We did a community forum on that topic later, and they ended up creating Tech Central here, and it's really blossomed here in Berks County.

SPEAKER_04 14:11

For our listeners who don't know or aren't familiar with Berks Tech Centro, can you just give a brief overview of what it is?

SPEAKER_01 14:18

It's uh essentially two organizations. It's called Tech Centro, which does workforce training and some other sorts of things for people in the community, mostly Hispanic, but not required to be Hispanic. And then it's also engaged with the Burks Latino Workforce Development Corporation, which is designed to do that. And they have a facility here. They actually now have two facilities here in writing where they offer those education training, things like culinary arts, diplumbing, driving commercial vehicles, those kinds of things, some basic education stuff, computer literacy. They have gone on to expand their programs significantly. They now have the literacy council is housed with them, and they've created some regional things. So they've created a training center at the Oak Brook Housing Development Corporation for people in the Oak Brook Housing Development. So it's become, I think, a very significant player here in Berks County in terms of trying to train and educate the next generation workforce.

SPEAKER_04 15:13

Certainly has. Yes. Thank you. So as we wrap up this podcast episode, I want to take a moment to thank you both for coming in today. If our listeners want to attend a community forum or connect with Spotlight PA, can you remind them how to do that? So for the Spotlight PA, the Burks edition, the newsletter, how do they sign up for that?

SPEAKER_03 15:32

Readers can go to spotlightpa.org slash newsletters, and there they will find all Spotlight PA newsletters. Good Day Burks is the one dedicated to Burks County.

SPEAKER_04 15:42

Okay, great. And then how do they sign up or start receiving the invitations for we maintain a mailing list of anybody who's registered for the event?

SPEAKER_01 15:51

We send out to those people. We encourage people to send it to their friends and colleagues. We keep adding and subtracting. So we have about 1,200 people on our mailing list. Wow. So they all get a copy of the actually they get two copies because they're asked them about that. They can reach out to Jose or to me. The best way to get both of us is you can get us at Spotlight PA, Burks Bureau, and you can sign up and register for the programs. He posts them, and so you can register that way as well.

SPEAKER_03 16:15

Yeah, if you're subscribed to Good Day Burks, you get also an invitation to the forums.

SPEAKER_01 16:20

Okay, great. And again, Monica, I want to talk about one major success that we've had that grew out of a uh report that the Burks Alliance did a long time ago on restoring passenger rail service in Burks County. And that has turned into a very successful sort of thing where the county commissioners in Berks, Chester and Montgomery County, created an authority. And we're gonna be doing a program coming up. I'm gonna do a commercial for two of our programs. We're gonna be doing a program coming up about what's happening now because there's some really interesting events there. And then we're gonna do one on the blighted property, and we're gonna have the city of Reading and a person who works in an economic development talk about some of the challenges that blighted properties have caused here in Berks County and what might be done to correct it.

SPEAKER_04 16:59

So those that will be the next community forum or it's in the works?

SPEAKER_01 17:03

That's uh July and August.

SPEAKER_04 17:04

Okay, great, great. And I know Spotlight PA is working on a festival, or is it too soon to announce?

SPEAKER_03 17:12

No, it's never too soon to announce the Ideas Festival. Spotlight PA is Ideas Festival. This is gonna be on October 3rd at the Google Works in Reading. We're gonna be bringing together community leaders, experts, local officials, not only from Berks County, from around the state, to discuss some issues that are important for Berks County. And we're talking about sustainability, environment, arts, and culture, and community. Those are the three tracks that we're gonna explore in this festival. Like important is not gonna be a boring conference, it's gonna be a fun festival. It's gonna be a great conference. It's gonna be a great event that we're gonna have that day.

SPEAKER_04 17:49

There have been other types of festivals in other parts of the country, right? I think the Texas has one.

SPEAKER_03 17:55

Yeah, yeah, yeah. These type of festivals happen by other nonprofit newsrooms across the country.

SPEAKER_04 18:01

Okay.

SPEAKER_03 18:02

And we're lucky enough to have the support of many of them in organizing the Berg's One.

SPEAKER_04 18:07

Great, great. Well, looking forward to that. And you said that's October?

SPEAKER_03 18:10

October 3rd.

SPEAKER_04 18:11

Okay, great. I'll save the date in my calendar. So thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you. Um if you'd like to learn more about the Community Foundation, you can follow us on social media and subscribe to our newsletter, and you can do so through our website. Thank you so much for listening. And remember, change starts with a spark, your spark.