Maria Sestito
Senior issues reporter
Senior issues reporter
Maria Sestito is an award winning writer and columnist currently reporting on older adults for The Desert Sun in Palm Springs, Calif. She is a Report for America Corps Member. Before moving to the desert, Maria worked as a reporter and photographer at daily newspapers in North Carolina and Northern California, including as the crime reporter for the Napa Valley Register. She is a "Jersey Girl," Rutgers University graduate, and proud member of the Desert Sun News Guild. She holds a master's in journalism from UC Berkeley, which she earned after already working in journalism for five years. Maria has been a Journalist in Aging Fellow, Age Boom Academy Fellow, Bloomberg-UNC-Berkeley Business Journalism Diversity Fellow, and Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellow.
How are we supposed to cover the community as a whole when we can’t communicate with a large portion of its residents?
For years in the western Coachella Valley, residents who don’t speak English have been left out of senior centers — the same places where many older adults go when experiencing isolation, loneliness, and housing, food or income insecurity.
The pandemic just made these problems worse — and the inequities more glaring.