5 Questions with Tayo's Leezel Tanglao
Tiny News Collective exists to support early-stage news entrepreneurs all across the United States who are raising their hands to provide community-focused news and information and places for community connection. We are who we are because of the founders we serve. And we want the journalism field, the civic information space and beyond to know about the creative, impactful work of these founders. To that end, we are thrilled to highlight their stories through an ongoing series of profiles and features.
For our latest feature, we checked in with Leezel Tanglao, one of the co-founders of Tayo, an organization working to provide the Filipino community with resources and news that help them navigate daily life. Launched during the COVID-19 pandemic as a virtual help desk, Tayo now conducts research, hosts health information sessions and publishes explainers that fight misinformation.
In 2025, they received an honorable mention in Phase II of the Build UP Trust Challenge from the National Institutes of Health. This competition seeks to identify solutions that increase research participation and the adoption of medical care by building trust and improving engagement with historically underserved communities. Tayo is one of 12 honorable mentions and is the only Filipino organization.
Be sure to read to the end, where Leezel answers our *bonus question* about her advice to other news entrepreneurs.
1. What's the origin story of Tayo and your reason for launching it?
The origin story of Tayo came out of the need to help our community in crisis. As alums of the Filipino Young Leaders Program (FYLPRO), many of our peers wanted a way to help during the COVID-19 pandemic. We saw too many of our aunties and uncles sharing misinformation, and our Filipino community was hit hard by the nature of being frontline health workers. As a result, our interdisciplinary team of young professionals in journalism, law, business, medicine and mental health came together to create a help desk to answer questions about the COVID-19 pandemic.
Since April 2020, the core team has been meeting almost every Sunday — for the last six years. We started as a COVID-19 help desk, but we now conduct first-party research through university partnerships, run a summer fellowship program and publish culturally tailored content on topics that impact Filipinos in the diaspora. Tayo provides vital, trustworthy and culturally relevant information to help Filipinos navigate the information ecosystem.
Since our founding, we’ve been awarded more than $500,000 in grants and funding from public and private foundations. Thanks to that funding, we’ve been able to hold in-person and virtual programming from vaccine clinics to webinars on heart health, mental health, media literacy and area meetups across North America, including Canada.
Due to our interdisciplinary nature, Tayo has presented at domestic and international conferences. including:
Non-Journalism Conferences:
- American Public Health Association
- Filipino American National Historical Society
- National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine
- National Conference on Health Communication, Marketing and Media
- RightsCon
- International Communication Association
- National Communication Association
Journalism Conferences:
- Asian American Journalists Association (AAJA)
- Collaborative Journalism Summit
- Perspectives at Online News Association
Currently, Tayo is a member of the Asian American Disinfo Table, Tiny News Collective and the Heart Truth Healthy Hearts Network. Tayo has received several national awards including a 2026 National Health Information Award and AAJA’s 2025 AAPI Community Impact Award.
2. Is there a particular moment when you feel you made an impact on your community with a story or an event?
It’s hard to pick a single moment, but several come to mind. During the pandemic, I recorded myself getting the first COVID-19 vaccine. A prominent professor of ethnic studies tweeted that our videos helped ease her mom’s hesitation about getting the vaccine. One more recent impact that stands out in my mind is from one of our Tayo fellow alums currently on the fellowship leadership team who mentioned how much the fellowship has given her and how doing this work for the community was life-changing.
Perhaps the biggest stages Tayo has been in during this journey were being invited to present at the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine’s Understanding and Addressing Misinformation about Science: A Public Workshop in 2023 in Washington, D.C., and speaking at a Congressional Briefing on Digital Civil Rights earlier that year. Being invited to these two spaces was a validation of Tayo’s work across the diaspora on a national level.
We are also currently working on innovative projects to advance our work beyond public health, such as ChatTayo, an online tool and chatbot designed to help community members quickly find reliable information and resources in the languages we speak at home: Tagalog, Ilocano, Bisaya and English.
3. You are conducting research on the Filipino American community's use and feelings toward AI and have produced several events. Tell us more about your strategy related to research and events.
Unlike a typical news outlet, we come from a very community-centered approach, rooted in our interdisciplinary team. The core team is composed of leaders and subject matter experts from health, legal, technology and creative arts. All of us are plugged into areas that overlap our day jobs. AI, for example, is something that cuts across all those areas. As the third largest Asian Pacific Islander American group in the United States, we are still underrepresented in research across all areas. We are not going to wait for others to research our community. We have enough expertise to do this ourselves and also amplify others doing this work.
We are currently recruiting participants for three research projects. One is the Filipino Americans and AI survey to better understand the Filipino American community's awareness, usage and attitudes toward artificial intelligence. Insights from survey responses will support Tayo's ongoing research on how Filipino Americans navigate the online media landscape and inform Tayo's efforts to develop resources that promote digital trust and safety for the community.
Tayo is also currently seeking Filipinx/a/o American parents/caregivers and adolescents to participate in the Learning About Kinship, Acculturation/Enculturation, and Strength Study. This study explores how cultural values, parent–child relationships and experiences of stress shape emotions, communication and mental health within Filipinx/a/o American families.
Lastly, Tayo is a community partner of the CARE Project, the Collaborative Approach for Asian Americans, Native Hawaiians & Pacific Islanders Research & Education. The purpose of CARE is to address the gap and reduce disparities in research participation among Asian Americans, Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders (AANHPI) by creating a research registry of AANHPI interested in participating in various research types.
It’s not enough to just do fact checks and report the news; Tayo is the connector and convener of all these spaces.
4. Tell us about your business model, how you generate revenue and how you plan to become sustainable in the long run.
We are in the middle of spinning off from our parent organization, FYLPRO. So far, we’ve sustained ourselves mostly by project grants. We’ve received a few non-restricted awards, but not enough to be fully sustainable. However, we are testing some campaigns, such as small donor appeals, to see if we could get the community involved in supporting us as well.
We would also like to explore consulting opportunities, starting an endowment and opening a merch shop.
5. What's your vision for Tayo this year and what it might become over time?
Ideally, I’d love to see Tayo fully spun off and working to cultivate its business model. Long term, I’d love to see our core team and others be able to do this work on a full-time basis, not only sustaining ourselves but also the organization for decades to come. For many of us, Tayo is one of the few spaces in our lives where we can bring our full selves unapologetically and authentically.
Leezel Tanglao
Leezel was published in Nonprofit Quarterly about Tayo's work.
6. What is one piece of advice you would give other entrepreneurs working to launch their own news organization?
It’s not going to be easy, but the reward is high. Having a team with you is core and a supportive community that gets it, like Tiny News Collective. We may not be the “traditional” news organization, but we fill in the gaps left by other news outlets by specifically serving our diasporic community.
We are unapologetic about who we serve, and we are also not afraid to go beyond just news. The first grant we ever received was because we focused on the Filipino community, and we didn’t go broad in our proposal. So don’t be afraid to lean into your identity because the right people and places will align. We are about and of the community, and we’re not shy about it.
Learn more about other TNC founders by reading these stories:
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