Riverside celebrates the appointment of Mazin Sidahmed, co-founder of Documented, as Executive Director of the Mayor’s Office of Ethnic and Community Media in the Mamdani administration. The appointment places a longtime champion of immigrant communities in a position to help ensure that New York City’s diverse communities have access to important information, services, and resources in the languages they speak.
Mazin co-founded Documented in 2018 with a simple but powerful idea: while many news outlets reported about immigrants, too few were reporting for immigrant communities themselves. Documented set out to change that. Through multilingual journalism, practical resource guides, and a commitment to listening to the people it serves, Documented helps immigrant New Yorkers understand their rights, access services, navigate complex systems, and make informed decisions about their lives.
At Riverside, we know that access to reliable information is essential to immigrant empowerment. Whether someone is learning English or looking for work, trying to understand a change in immigration policy or navigating daily city services, having information they can trust and use makes an enormous difference. This is why we deeply value relationships with organizations like Documented, why we've regularly featured its reporting and resource guides in Riverside Links, and why we were honored to welcome Mazin as a panelist at last year's State of the Field. Though our organizational work takes different forms, we share a core belief: immigrant communities must have a meaningful voice in the decisions that affect their lives, and the institutions that serve them must be built to listen.
Mazin's appointment is a win for New York City's immigrant communities. His selection reflects the Mamdani administration's commitment to centering immigrant voices and recognizing the leaders who have long championed our communities. It also affirms what we at Riverside have long believed: those who work most closely with immigrant communities, understand their experiences, and have earned their trust bring essential knowledge and expertise to public leadership. We congratulate Mazin on this well-deserved appointment and look forward to seeing more trusted community leaders help shape our city's future.