Amplify Utah supports and facilitates dynamic journalistic storytelling to celebrate diverse points of view. By partnering with traditional media, we cultivate an environment that encourages stories be shared widely and made easily accessible for our communities to read, hear, watch and engage.
Sandy’s new female speaking club strives to amplify women’s voices
07-06-2025 By Savannah Stacey
These women have entered their public speaking era.
80 Years Later: Student Documentary Revisits Utah's Topaz Camp
05-11-2025 By Jordan Thornblad
"It [is] so important to Utah history that we don’t brush this under the rug."
'Don't Let It Happen Again': Topaz Survivors Warn of Detention Powers
05-11-2025 By Marissa Bond
“When you forget your history, you repeat it,” says a 94-year-old Japanese American in the University of Utah student-made documentary.
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A woman from Venezuela came to Luz Gamarra in January with a request: Bring English-as-a-second-language classes to Salt Lake Community College’s annex in Herriman, where the woman lived.
Gamarra, the lead academic adviser for humanities and ESL students at SLCC, told the woman she needed to gather at least 10 signatures from residents wanting the program in Herriman. The annex there offers general-education classes to Salt Lake County’s southwest corner. The nearest campus offering ESL classes was at SLCC’s Taylorsville location on Redwood Road, nearly 16 miles away.
Four months later, the woman returned with more than 60 signatures. Gamarra coordinated with the ESL department, and soon, ESL classes were on the Herriman Annex course schedule for the fall semester, which begins August 23.
“We’re so happy,” Gamarra said. “We are here to respond to the necessities of our communities and students of different backgrounds.”
For Gamarra, the work is personal — because back in 2004, arriving in Salt Lake City from Peru with two graduate degrees but unable to speak English, she was in much the same situation.
In her 12 years at the college, Gamarra has helped hundreds of ESL students primarily through peer mentoring programs, such as Amigos Mentores (“mentor friends”) and ESL Legacy Mentors, which pairs new ESL students with current and past students to help them succeed. Gamarra calls this “the chain of success.”
Her work has led to national recognition. In March, USA Today honored her as their Utah “Women of the Year” for her significant positive impact on her community. The paper cited her work with immigrants and ESL students to get them into college, and then connecting them with mentors.
“These honorees are strong and resilient women who have been champions of change across the country, leading and inspiring as they promote and fight for equity, and give others a place to seek help and find hope,” USA Today wrote.
As a student in Peru, Gamarra earned her master’s and doctorate studies in law and political science. When she moved to Utah with her family in 2004, she got one consistent answer whenever she asked about how her degrees could be applied in the U.S. workforce: “You need to start over.”
Gamarra said she reluctantly accepted the advice because she did not speak English and found herself in an unfamiliar country and academic circumstances. Wanting to learn the language, Gamarra enrolled at SLCC in 2005, starting with ESL classes. Two years later, she had earned an associate degree in social work.
She then went to the University of Utah to apply for a bachelor’s degree, where a staff member told her she had been given wrong information years before. “[They] told me that there had been no need to start with an associate degree,” Gamarra said in Spanish. “I could have immediately applied for a master’s degree.”
“This idea had been put into my head, that I would need to start from scratch all over again,” Gamarra said. “Looking back, it seems that school members did not know how to work with [non-English speakers and] people from other countries.”
Gamarra said that “many immigrants like me were going through the same thing ... they didn’t have the accurate information to take advantage of and grow.”
Learning that, she said, spurred her to action. “I knew I had to do something,” she said.
After earning a master’s in social work, Gamarra returned to SLCC to work as an adviser, with the goal of helping ESL students get into college. In her job, Gamarra oversees ESL Legacy Mentors, a peer mentoring program that began in September 2019 and now helps over 300 students.
Often, she said, new ESL students — most of whom were born outside the country and experience a language barrier — feel nervous or too embarrassed to ask for help. Programs like ESL Legacy Mentors work to build trust.
“Having a mentor makes the difference,” Gamarra said. “Creating activities where students can feel a sense of belonging, connect and make friends – for me that is the key. Many times, the cultural shock of having to learn English can isolate us.”
Gamarra said about 80% of the students who walk into her office only intend to learn English and move on, believing that school is not for them. SLCC graduate Cinthia Gonzalez was one such student.
Gonzalez, also from Peru, moved to Utah in January 2020. She loved the state but found it hard to integrate, and felt she needed to learn a new language and more about the cultural differences. Gonzalez decided to take ESL classes, which is where she met Gamarra.
“My initial goal was just to learn English, so I could communicate, and then to get a job – to do things for myself,” Gonzalez said.
While taking ESL classes, Gonzalez became more involved in the college and acted as president of ESL Legacy Mentors from February 2020 to December 2021, and remained a student mentor afterwards. She said the program changed how she viewed education. “The group showed me that I could study something more,” Gonzalez said.
Gonzalez received scholarships to pursue a degree in interior design, and walked at SLCC’s commencement ceremony earlier this month. While at the college, Gonzalez also took interest in construction, and is now looking to transfer to Utah Valley University to study construction management.
She’ll continue to offer advice to students, she said, even if informally: “[We are] mentors forever.”
Gamarra said the USA Today honor was not a solo effort. She dedicated the award, she said, “to those grand women who have helped me, accompanied me and continue to accompany me.”
Those include students, professors and colleagues — as well as her daughters and her mother, who as a widow worked to support Gamarra and her siblings.
Gamarra’s daughter, Elizabeth, 23 — who graduated from SLCC in 2014 (at age 16) and received the college’s inaugural Rising Star Award, which recognizes alumni who “have made a profound and positive impact in their communities and beyond” — recalled when her mother began to create peer mentorship programs.
“It was nice to see my mom form some sort of community at SLCC where I could see myself reflected,” she said.
Elizabeth Gamarra – who has been a Fulbright Scholar, Oxford Consortium Fellowship recipient, Rotary Peace Fellow and TEDx speaker – said she mentored five Latina women, as part of her mother’s early efforts to create peer mentorship. It was, Elizabeth said, a “transformative experience because they ended up helping me more. It was the first time I saw Latina women super united.”
Luz Gamarra likened community colleges to “prepared soil” for helping ESL students — and that, for her, mentorship is an effort that doesn’t end.
“My dad always said, alongside my mom, ‘You must help someone, that’s good. Don’t leave alone – always take someone with you,’” she said. “In this life, we are here to help someone, to walk with someone hand in hand who knows the same as you, and grow.”
Cristian Martinez wrote this story as a journalism student at Salt Lake Community College. It is published as part of a collaborative including nonprofits Amplify Utah and The Salt Lake Tribune.
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We also request organizations include the following text either at the beginning or end of the story text :This story is jointly published by nonprofits Amplify Utah and [Your Media Organization's Name] to elevate diverse perspectives in local media through emerging journalism. Cristian Martinez wrote this story as a journalism student at Salt Lake Community College. For more stories from Amplify Utah, visit amplifyutah.org/use-our-work.
Kaylee Gates suffered months on end, waiting for her body to adapt to her hormonal birth control implant.
Weight gain, mood swings and acne began to wreak havoc on her body and mind. The longer she waited, the more her hope faded.
“The challenges I faced were really awful,” she said. “[It got] to a point where it wasn’t even worth it any more.”
Two years in, Gates decided that she had enough when extreme nausea, irritability and period pains incapacitated her for a full week. She discussed the risks with her doctor, and with the implant removed, she hoped the worst of it would now come to an end.
“I am two years off of it, and I am still having those issues,” said Gates, 22. “It’s still causing me issues with my mood, like being irritable, and it caused me a lot of weight gain and made my periods heavier.”
Gates and her new husband, 22-year-old Azhurel Mendes, got married in March and are considering their future as parents. They aren’t ready now, they said, but because birth control made Gates so miserable, having other options – like a new prescription contraceptive for men – could have helped them better manage their own family planning.
The University of Utah’s ASCENT Center for Reproductive Health and seven other sites across the nation, contracted by the National Institute of Health, now are studying a potential beacon of hope for couples like Gates and Mendes.
Nestorone-testosterone, otherwise known as NES/T, is a gel applied to a sperm-producing man’s shoulder. NES/T consists of two main compounds: Nestorone and a testosterone replacement.
“This is a combination gel,” said Dr. David Turok, director of the U.’s ASCENT Center and lead investigator of the Utah site. “Nestorone is basically a synthetic version of progesterone, [which] is used in an FDA-approved vaginal ring.”
Progesterone blocks the hormones that allow for ovulation in many female-born patients. With NES/T, Turok said a similar hormone-blocking effect can be created in men. Contraception methods that utilize progesterone now are only available to female-born patients.
“[The gel] does basically the same thing, but the end result, the target, is in the testes,” Turok said. “It does two things there: It stops sperm production and [negatively] impacts testosterone production. That’s why you need the second drug in it, [the synthetic] testosterone.”
A man using the gel daily, Turok said, may need to wait one to six months for his sperm count to drop to a level deemed reliable to prevent pregnancy.
The U’s study of NES/T consists of 20 heterosexual couples. For Turok, this new method has shown potential for a shift in responsibility of hormonal birth control, which typically has fallen on women.
“The most common theme is that the female member of the couple is saying, ‘I’ve tried all these things and they don’t work, and now it’s his turn,’” Turok said.
Turok said he believes that sentiment exists among many couples who don’t want children or aren’t ready for pregnancy.
“The way our society tries to shame and blame women around [unplanned or undesired] pregnancy and then, amazingly, not pursue or acknowledge the man’s role in it is really phenomenal,” Turok said. “From what we’ve seen from the participants in this trial, men [are] acknowledging, ‘I have a role in this, and I want to step up.’”
After watching his wife suffer the side effects of her birth control for so many years, Mendes said he’s interested in learning more about the male version of such contraceptives.
“If it’s not any worse than birth control for women, I think it is only fair that men could take the brunt of it, for once,” he said.
The second phase of the study is still going on. According to Turok, if the gel is to receive approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, it still will need to go through a third phase of study, which would likely enroll more than 1,000 couples and follow them for a year — then the data would be analyzed and submitted to the FDA.
As researchers continue their work, both Mendes and Gates expressed concern over the gel’s side effects, and wondered if they could be similar or worse than current birth control methods available to women.
“If we did a lot of [personal] research into it … and there were a lot of other people who had tried it, I think I would be willing for you to try it,” Gates said, motioning to her husband. Mendes first heard about the study when it was announced in January 2022 and wanted to learn more about it then.
Four years earlier, the Male Contraceptive Initiative found that a lot of other men shared Mendes’s interest. Out of 1,500 men from the United States, ages 18-44, 80% either believed that they had a sole or shared responsibility to prevent pregnancy. Of those men, 70% said they’d be willing to try new contraceptive methods.
While there is evidence that men want to share the birth control burden with their partners, Turok said NEST/T could lead to trust issues, as women might have a difficult time trusting their partners to consistently and correctly use birth control.
“One of the main questions that researchers have put out there is, ‘Is this acceptable for female partners?’ We are collecting some data on that,” he said. “If a man says, ‘I’m using this,’ will their female partner accept [and trust] them?”
While adoption of modern female birth control options, such as the IUD, has become more common at the turn of the century, the development of male birth control has conversely been met with several obstacles. Turok said he’s eager for the gel’s results to be published, but, “I have no idea when that will be,” he added.
Whenever the gel ultimately goes on the market, Turok said, “it’s [likely not] going to be the most popular choice right off the bat, but I do think it is an important step forward.”
Ethan Udy wrote this story as a journalism student at Salt Lake Community College. It is published as part of a collaborative including nonprofits Amplify Utah and The Salt Lake Tribune.
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We also request organizations include the following text either at the beginning or end of the story text :This story is jointly published by nonprofits Amplify Utah and [Your Media Organization's Name] to elevate diverse perspectives in local media through emerging journalism. Ethan Udy wrote this story as a journalism student at Salt Lake Community College. For more stories from Amplify Utah, visit amplifyutah.org/use-our-work.
Construction workers recently laid tile and installed the first all-gender restroom in the University of Utah’s Language and Communication Building.
There are now more than 100 such restrooms across the U’s campus. Many have been installed since the Utah Legislature’s 2024 session, when it passed H.B. 257, which restricts which changing rooms transgender people can use in public buildings.
The bill, which Gov. Spencer Cox signed on Jan. 30, 2024, applies to changing rooms and restrooms adjacent to spaces like locker rooms, according to @theU, the university’s media relations site.
“H.B. 257 ended up not impacting the university as much as people thought it would, but that’s not to say there won’t be future legislation that would,” said Rebecca Walsh, communications director for the U.
The all-gender restrooms include family and single-stall restrooms, as well as multi-stall all-gender facilities — like the restroom on the first floor of the J. Willard Marriott Library. (The locations of all-gender restrooms can be found on the campus map by clicking on the three-line menu in the upper left corner, selecting “accessibility & safety” from the dropdown menu, then the “all gender restrooms” category.)
The Marriott Library’s all-gender restroom includes multiple private stalls, with solid wooden doors positioned around a shared center sink area. The restroom has a modern design, with bright lighting and neutral tones that create a clean environment.
The Marriott restroom, Walsh said, “was built from the ground up to be that amazing facility that you see.”
Since the bill passed, Walsh said, all-gender restrooms have been added to campus plans and renovated in existing buildings. According to @theU, many older buildings, such as Libby Gardner Hall and some on President’s Circle and Fort Douglas, do not have all-gender restrooms.
According to @theU, in 2022, the Inclusive Restroom Committee, made up of administrators from various departments, adopted design standards for University Facilities Management to consider converting new and renovated multi-stall restrooms to all-gender restrooms.
Walsh said since the Utah Legislature is still reviewing and updating state law regarding restrooms in public buildings, the university is taking a slow and cautious approach to converting these restrooms.
“On the facilities side, with every new building that is opening on campus, we need to think about the needs of the public – who will be using the building as well as the students, staff and faculty and how we can accommodate their needs,” Walsh said.
Walsh said the university has not yet established a timeline or quota.
H.B. 257 has specific prohibitions that apply to changing rooms in government-owned or government-controlled facilities open to the general public, according to a presentation created by the U with guidance from the Office of General Counsel. The term “changing room” is defined as a space for multiple people to dress or undress in the same space. The prohibitions also apply to restrooms that are within or attached to a changing room, according to the presentation.
While the law does not require the university to modify existing restrooms or changing rooms, Walsh said there has been an increase in all-gender restrooms since the new prohibitions took effect earlier this year.
According to the Office of General Counsel presentation, the bill allows people to continue to use the restroom of their choice, regardless of gender identity. The university is not required to contact law enforcement if a person uses a sex-designated restroom that doesn’t align with the person’s sex assigned at birth, unless the restroom is attached or within a changing room, according to @theU.
Colin Baker, a gender studies major and local drag artist, said the new law has been on their mind. Baker recently worked with the Center for Community and Cultural Engagement, which absorbed the former LGBT Resource Center in July.
Baker said they appreciate the availability of all-gender restrooms in Gardner Commons, where they have a majority of their classes.
Baker said that in the older business building, known as BUC, the gendered bathrooms were on separate floors, and the men’s restroom was missing stall doors at the time. Baker said they didn’t feel comfortable with the options presented, and would instead walk to a different building if they needed to go to the restroom during classes there.
Gender studies major Juniper Nilsson, who exclusively uses all-gender restrooms, said she first heard about the bill during the Legislative session and felt “hopeful apprehension.” While she hoped the bill would lead to more inclusive restrooms, she said she feared it might result in a more restrictive ban.
“The hope was well warranted because we always need hope, but at the same time, it was good to be wary of the consequences so we wouldn’t be blindsided by [the bill],” Nilsson said.
While students like Baker and Nilsson have had various experiences with all-gender restrooms on campus, the impact of these facilities goes beyond academic buildings. On-campus housing has also aimed to create a more inclusive living environment.
According to @theU, Housing and Residential Education offers students in on-campus housing the option to select their preferred room. Students can choose between male, female, or gender-inclusive rooms.
“We welcome all students to live on campus, regardless of their gender identity,” said Rachel Aho, senior director of housing at the U.
According to @theU, campus housing does not have shared multi-user spaces, so all restroom spaces are either single-gender or designed for single users and available to people of any gender.
Gender-inclusive rooms offer a supportive space for transgender, nonbinary, and LGBTQIA students seeking to connect with others, according to Housing & Residential Education. The office offers gender-inclusive housing rooms in each of the housing areas on campus, except for two upper campus Gateway Heights communities, Aho said.
This article was published from the University of Utah’s COMM 1610 class.
When the COVID-19 pandemic threatened to suspend Salt Lake Community College’s prison education program in the spring of 2020, the school rushed to expedite a way it could continue to offer classes should future shutdowns occur.
It came in the form of 100 new laptops.
The devices, slated to arrive at the Draper prison this summer, will allow students to study from their cells, type papers, access educational resources and contact their professors, said David Bokovoy, SLCC’s director of prison education. Students will not have access to the internet.
The school purchased the laptops after an anonymous donor made a gift in March that made it possible, said Lexi Wilson, an administrative assistant for the program. Providing students laptops had been on the wish list for years, but the pandemic made it a more pressing issue, said Wilson.
Before COVID-19 appeared in Utah, about 250 students were taking classes each semester, but the pandemic forced the program to stop classes until last fall.
“We had no clue if we were going to continue or end the classes all together,” Wilson said. “This was not by choice, but the prison wasn’t allowing any programming during that time.”
The number of students currently taking classes is down to about 80.
The laptops are a fairly simple addition, but Bokovoy said its impact increases access to education significantly when classes are curtailed due to a global pandemic or forced lockdowns.
The prison education program at SLCC has become one of the biggest in-person prison education programs in the country, Bokovoy said. Since its inception in 2017, the program has served more than 600 students, per SLCC.
While most prison education programs are run off site through correspondence, Bokovoy said holding face-to-face classes remains a priority because they provide students with a positive social environment where topics of importance can be discussed with classmates and trained instructors.
The classes through the prison, he said, are no different than those offered at any one of SLCC’s 11 campuses across the Salt Lake valley.
“It is every bit as academically rigorous and demanding as what transpires on our mainstream campuses, if not more so, because of the unique challenges our students face in taking courses in that sort of environment,” Bokovoy said.
Through the program, students 18 and older who graduated high school or have a GED can pursue an Associates of Science or a general education certificate, according to Wilson. Students who are unable to perform at college level can take preparation courses in math and English.
One student, who has been incarcerated for 20 years and is required by the program to speak anonymously, said the education program makes an impact that goes beyond those taking classes.
“The presence of higher education in prison gives us a chance to radically change our lives for the betterment of everyone,” he wrote in a testimonial that Bokovoy shared. “A fully functioning higher education program creates an atmosphere of striving for knowledge and improvement. It has ripple effects that permeate the rest of the prison population.”
Many students are their first in their families to go to college, including one man who has yet to tell his mother he’s pursuing an Associates of Science degree.
“I’m about two more semesters away from that big day, and I have not told my mother because I would love to give her my degree as a Mother’s Day surprise,” he said, again in a testimonial. “I want her to be proud of me.”
In April 2020, SLCC was invited by the U.S. Department of Education to participate in the Second Chance Pell experiment, which is a pilot program that allows incarcerated students to qualify for need-based federal Pell Grants to help pay for postsecondary education.
This experiment, initially created in 2015, nearly doubled last year, allowing incarcerated students to use Federal Pell Grants at 130 schools located in 42 states and Washington, D.C.
In December, Congress passed the Coronavirus Response and Relief Supplemental Appropriations Act of 2021. The stimulus package included the FAFSA simplification act, which allows incarcerated people to qualify for Pell Grants, previously banned in the Clinton-era Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994.
According to Prison Policy Initiative, “the average of the minimum daily wages paid to incarcerated workers for non-industry prison jobs is 86 cents.”
This has made college education for incarcerated people practically unattainable unless their prison was a part of the very recent Second Chance Pell experiment according to the Vera Institute of Justice.
A 2019 study by the Vera Institute of Justice estimates that nearly half a million inmates would be eligible for Pell grants if the ban were lifted.
Bokovoy thinks the recently passed legislation will help broaden access and reduce recidivism rates, which is the rate at which previously incarcerated people go back to prison. High recidivism rates in the U.S. have consistently been an issue.
According to a study by the Bureau of Justice Statistics that followed 404,638 state prisoners that were released in 2005, 83% “were arrested at least once during the 9 years following their release.”
Additionally, 44% of the prisoners were arrested at least once within their first year of being released.
Reducing recidivism rates, particularly for low-level drug offenders is a goal of Utah lawmakers, who passed extensive criminal justice reform in 2014. Their goals haven’t been met entirely. An audit conducted last fall “found that in 2013, the recidivism rate for low-level drug offenders was 29%” and in 2018 “that number jumped to 37%.”
Prison education has proven to be one of the best ways to combat recidivism, according to corrections experts.
In 2016, the Rand Corporation conducted a study that found that “inmates who participate in any kind of educational program behind bars—from remedial math to vocational auto shop to college-level courses—are up to 43 percent less likely to reoffend and return to prison.”
Although the initial cost of investing in prison education programs can be high, the same study found for “every dollar invested in correctional education, they save nearly five in reincarceration costs over the next three years.” Rand noted the per-person cost of prison educational programs is between $1,400 and $1,700.
For this reason, Bokovoy believes “it makes sense for taxpayers to prioritize higher education in the prison system” from a financial perspective.
Going forward, Bokovoy noted he hopes to expand the prison education system in Utah by broadening program offerings to juvenile detention centers, possibly as soon as 2022.
With the first buildings of the new Salt Lake prison facility opening near the airport by the end of this year, Bokovoy said the educational resources will also receive a sizeable upgrade for “all incarcerated individuals in the state of Utah.”
But more than anything, Bokovoy said empathy for incarcerated students is crucial.
“All of these men and women have a story,” he said. “Everyone deserves a chance to better themselves by pursuing education, and that would certainly include those who have made mistakes in the past, like we all do.”
