Eddie Avila

Eddie Ávila is the Director of Rising Voices (https://rising.globalvoices.org), the outreach arm of Global Voices (https://www.globalvoices.org), which supports and mentors underrepresented communities, especially those that speak indigenous and endangered languages (http://www.activismolenguas.org), by promoting the use of citizen media and free software tools as a way to tell their own digital stories and revitalize their mother languages. He started with GV in 2005 as a volunteer writing about Bolivia, and later became its Latin America Editor. Prior to his work with Rising Voices, he co-founded the Voces Bolivianas project, providing digital media training to indigenous students in the city of El Alto, which led to the creation of the first Aymara-language blogs and activity on social media. He is currently based in Cochabamba, Bolivia.