Today we’d like to introduce you to Liz Rebecca Alarcon.
Liz Rebecca, let’s start with your story. We’d love to hear how you got started and how the journey has been so far.
Professionally I define myself as a communicator, facilitator and social entrepreneur. These three “labels” are the aftermath of the explorations of my 20s, during which I held a slew of jobs across industries including the non-profit sector, broadcast media, charter school system and public opinion research.
Add to these professional pursuits a penchant for service, which I’ve channeled through a myriad of “extracurriculars” including student government, the Model UN circuit, human rights activism, and leading young professionals groups including the Miami Hub of the World Economic Forum’s Global Shapers Community.
Beyond the professional I exist in the hyphen, seeking to bridge the gap between English and Spanish, my American and Venezuelan upbringing, the mundane and the transcendental, and plenty of leisurely pursuits including studying human behavior, dancing, traveling, reading good books, and epicurean experiences that keep me endlessly engaged.
I guess from all that you can gather that I am a multi-passionate person…
After living in Costa Rica as a Fulbright Scholar and subsequently moving to Washington D.C., the plan was to pursue those passions there, but home really is where the heart is so I moved back to Miami in 2015 with a commitment to building community here for the foreseeable future.
Overall, has it been relatively smooth? If not, what were some of the struggles along the way?
Returning to Miami was not a smooth transition. My goal was to secure a media job when I moved back, but I underestimated how difficult it would be to translate my experience in Costa Rica and D.C. to fit the supply and demand of the Miami job market. To add to that, traditional media outlets have been facing extreme volatility, so it was a complicated reality to navigate. I had to recalibrate to find a job outside of my original scope of work that could still marry my media background with my interest in politics and other issues. Being flexible during the the job hunt resulted in a role where I gained experience in advocacy and Florida politics, which proved to be crucial preparation for all that leading Pulso entails.
I’m grateful that the work situation worked out in the end, but while I was “funemployed” for several months in 2015, it was difficult to appreciate the good all around me and to put things in perspective. It was definitely a restless time.
Please tell us about Pulso.
Pulso is a digital organizing platform aimed at building political power for Latino voters across the country. There are 29 million Latinos eligible to vote yet the rate at which we are choosing to stay home during elections is rising faster than the rate of those of us eligible to participate. An overwhelming body of voter mobilization research shows that people are most likely to be civically engaged and to participate in elections when contacted personally by someone they know. That’s where Pulso comes in. Our advocacy efforts center around friends-telling-friends to Get Out the Vote through our platform.
But before we can massively turn out the vote and lead our users to be civically engaged beyond the voting booth we have to first create trust with our users. We do that by delivering content that is relevant to them straight to their phones: news, history, entertainment and information that speaks to the Latino community. Our aim is to use digital organizing tools to develop Latino organizing forces that have the power and scale of the NRA and AARP, making Pulso a platform that leads to offline organizing, driving advocacy and electoral action, and holding politicians accountable.
Pulso is about to turn 1 year old this January and in our first year of testing and iterating on both our content service and our Get Out the Vote efforts we have grown to more than 170,000 subscribers across the country, we registered more 700 new voters and our elections messaging reached more than 700,000 people in the U.S. So although we like to spend little time sharing our successes and more time running experiments to optimize our platform, it’s uplifting to see the progress we made in this first year, making for a promising 2019.
If you had to go back in time and start over, would you have done anything differently?
I’d have more patience with myself, I’d listen to my gut more, and I’d trust that my non-linear career path would lead me to opportunities that would allow me to both have impact at scale and personal fulfillment. I could have never predicted an opportunity like co-founding Pulso, but as cheesy as it may sound, Steve Jobs was right, you really can’t connect the dots looking forward.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://m.me/projectpulso
- Email: info@projectpulso.org
- Instagram: @ProjectPulso
Image Credit:
Daniela Cadena
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