We are delighted to announce the opening of a new satellite office on Mariachi Plaza in Boyle Heights; the launch of a groundbreaking multi-platform initiative with the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority (Metro); and an expanded partnership with KCRW.

Zócalo is joining forces with Metro to explore how people live in and move around Southern California today. Our new series, #myLAcommute, will feature the voices, visions, and experiences of a broad range of Angelenos—as they tell their L.A. stories in their own words. #myLAcommute will be published five days a week by Zócalo and distributed by Metro’s The Source and KCRW.com.

Together, Zócalo and Metro are also launching a pioneering new fellowship program—based out of Zócalo’s new Boyle Heights satellite office—to encourage young Angelenos to explore their city. These college students and recent graduates will collect written, spoken, and visual stories from fellow passengers on Metro bus and rail lines. The stories they find will form the core of #myLAcommute.

Zócalo is also expanding its longstanding partnership with Los Angeles NPR affiliate KCRW 89.9 and KCRW.com. KCRW will be publishing all Zócalo’s syndicated editorial content as well as featuring stories on-air, online, and on social media. KCRW will also co-present all Zócalo events.

As new partnerships and projects bring Zócalo to audiences around the country, we remain committed to helping Angelenos tell their stories, and creating a deeper sense of place and attachment for Southern Californians.

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“What It Means to Be American” is a multimedia, multiplatform national conversation that brings together leading thinkers, public figures, and Americans from all walks of life to explore big, visceral questions about how our nation’s past can help us understand its present and imagine its future. Our kick-off event on January 14, “The Women of the West,” will feature former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor and Anna Maria Chávez, CEO of the Girl Scouts of the USA, at the Heard Museum in Phoenix. “What It Means to Be American” also features an interactive component, which will ask the public to share their American stories in response to questions such as, “What does your family own that belongs in the Smithsonian?” For more on “What It Means to Be American,” we invite you to check out our new website, whatitmeanstobeamerican.org.

“Open Art” explores the role art plays in our lives, our country, and our civic culture through free public events at the Getty and at selected sites around Los Angeles and jointly published journalism. This new collaboration formalizes a longstanding partnership between the Getty and Zócalo Public Square. Since 2008, Zócalo has presented events at the Getty Museum that contextualize museum exhibitions to explore urgent issues that emerge from works of art and to reach broader, more diverse audiences. Now, Zócalo and the Getty will also co-present events around Los Angeles and invite leading artists, writers, curators, and scholars to contribute articles to “Open Art.”

Like everything we publish at zocalopublisquare.org, all of our “What It Means to Be American” and “Open Art” articles will be syndicated to over 160 media outlets around the country. Zócalo articles appear in publications including The Washington Post, Time, Fortune, the San Francisco Chronicle, Houston Chronicle, Sacramento Bee, Dallas Morning News, Denver Post, Baltimore Sun, and USA Today.

In addition to bolstering our growing reach, these new partnerships serve to advance Zócalo’s mission of translating ideas to broad audiences and connecting people to ideas and to each other. They also mark our transition from a local to a national institution.

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In the seven free public programs per year that we’ll present around L.A., and in the four pieces we’ll publish per week, we’ll ask questions about public policy and culture, science and the arts. All pieces and events will be published at www.zocalopublicsquare.org and will be distributed to Zócalo’s national media syndicate of over 110 outlets, which reach a combined monthly readership of 40 million. These outlets include USA Today and the Gannett newspapers, Time.com, and Popular Science as well as 28 news organizations throughout California, including the San Francisco Chronicle, Sacramento Bee, L.A. Daily News, and the OC Register.

Thinking L.A. will create a much-needed place where all Southern Californians are invited to discuss, debate, and come together around the future of our city and its place in the world. L.A. has long been a diffuse, disconnected city. But the reach and influence of the institutions that once connected us are waning. Zócalo—which has built the most diverse civic forum in the nation in 10 years—and UCLA—California’s largest university—are stepping in to fill a tremendous void.

Thinking L.A. pieces can be viewed here, and reservations for our inaugural event on November 18, “The State of L.A.’s Plate,” can be made here.

Becca MacLaren, former speechwriter to California Attorney General Kamala Harris, has joined Zócalo as associate editor to lead the Thinking L.A. project.

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