Awards
Each awardee brings a unique contribution to strengthening communities and expanding access to opportunity.
The Mission Telecom Vision Award for Social Impact
We honor leaders who embody our core values: a relentless commitment to systemic social and racial justice, bold innovation, and strategic, data-informed impact that uplifts grassroots communities. Selected for their proven impact and courage in driving lasting change, this annual award provides unrestricted support that strengthens both their work and their well-being.
Aura Bogado
2025
Aura is an investigative reporter focused on immigration and the lived experiences behind federal policy. After years covering national systems, she is moving to Chicago to deepen reporting in communities facing intensified enforcement. Her work blends public records, data analysis, and trusted source relationships to reveal how policy becomes practice. With support from Mission Telecom Giving, Aura will produce sustained, community-centered investigations that illuminate the human impact of today’s immigration landscape.
Aura Bogado's work sits at the crossroads of immigration, public accountability, and community impact. After years covering national immigration systems and the structures that shape them, she is shifting her focus to Chicago—now one of the most visible sites of federal enforcement activity. Her reporting is grounded in what she witnesses on the street and what she uncovers through records, data, and long-term relationships with sources.
A recent visit to Chicago offered a clear picture of the urgency: identification sleeves worn in public by residents signaling their immigration status, empty neighborhood restaurants, and federal agents preparing for a raid. These are not isolated moments but indicators of a deeper story—one that demands consistent, local reporting rather than brief national attention cycles. Aura is committed to tracing these patterns, asking who is most affected, and documenting how families and communities experience the weight of evolving federal priorities.
With her new role as senior investigative reporter at Injustice Watch, Aura will anchor her work within a newsroom committed to public-service journalism. Support from Mission Telecom Giving provides the stability needed to relocate, build relationships with Chicago’s immigrant communities, and pursue investigative projects that extend well beyond daily news coverage.
Aura’s expertise in FOIA, data manipulation, and sensitive source protection strengthens her ability to reveal how immigration policy is carried out in practice. Her reporting has long centered the voices often excluded from conversations about enforcement—children arriving alone, families navigating raids, and workers inside the system who see its failures firsthand.
By investing in Aura’s work, Mission Telecom Giving helps ensure that one of the most pressing issues of our time is covered with depth, accuracy, and a commitment to community understanding.
Tatenda Musapatike
2025
In 2024, Tatenda challenged failing digital norms in the highest-stakes election of our time, redirecting millions toward long-term, evidence-based engagement with voters of color. After the election and the dissolution of the Voter Formation Project, she set out to build Formation Impact, a new entity designed to generate sustainable data insights and strategies for reaching voters of color. Mission Telecom Giving supports her next chapter, recognizing her leadership as essential to a resilient multiracial democracy.
In 2024, Tatenda stepped into one of the most volatile political landscapes in recent memory. With the future of American democracy on the line, she saw a critical gap: the digital strategy behind the Harris campaign lacked the urgency, cultural fluency, and scale needed to mobilize voters of color. While tens of millions flowed into broad, unfocused messaging on major platforms, Tatenda pushed in the opposite direction.
She rejected short-term thinking and the prevailing belief that voters of color could be reached through last-minute blitzes or by leaning on an expensive influencer model. Her approach was grounded in evidence, not trend cycles. She redirected roughly $8 million toward long-term engagement efforts designed to build trust, strengthen turnout, and center racial justice—not as an add-on, but as the core of the work.
“POC voters are 30 percent of the audience, but only 5 percent of marketing budgets,” she noted. “We left at least a half percentage point per state.”
Her strategic clarity came at a real cost. After the election, with no funders stepping up to sustain the Voter Formation Project, the organization dissolved by early 2025. Yet Tatenda’s response to this setback reflects the same determination that shaped her approach to the election.
She is now building Formation Impact, a new corporate entity designed to operate beyond the constraints of philanthropic cycles and political trends. She plans to acquire the Voter Formation Project through this new structure and relaunch it as a project within a more stable, self-directed ecosystem. The next chapter involves creating subscription-based data insights for voters of color and training others on how to effectively and affordably reach these communities.
Mission Telecom Giving supports Tatenda’s effort to build a durable model for movement work—one that can withstand economic shifts, election cycles, and funder volatility. Her leadership in multiracial democracy is unmatched. She has challenged prevailing digital assumptions on the Left, pioneered strategies grounded in evidence and equity, and carried out work that has often been underfunded, underrecognized, and deeply necessary.
Unrestricted support for Tatenda is more than an investment in one leader; it's an investment in the future. It is a commitment to the ripple effects of her vision—stronger civic engagement, better data, and a more honest pathway to reaching the communities that shape our democracy. Whatever comes next for her—rest, recalibration, or another bold build—her influence will continue to shape the strategic landscape at a moment when the country needs clarity most.
Mission Telecom is organized and operated as tax-exempt under section 501(c)(4) of the Internal Revenue Code. Mission Telecom Giving grant-making decisions, and the criteria used to inform them, are completely independent of the activities generating program revenue for Mission Telecom.