Grassroots Strategies™
At Grassroot Strategies, we are more than a consulting company—we are agents for transformation.
We bridge the gap between mainstream power and diverse ethnic communities by leveraging strategic connections and fostering meaningful collaboration.
We unlock opportunities, amplify voices, and transform a vision into tangible impact, catalyzing lasting change and opening new frontiers for growth and profitability.
As strategists, we are ‘Glocal’—an intersection between global and local—because we know that the impetus is from the bottom up.
José Bayona
Founder & CEO
José Bayona is the Founder and CEO of Grassroots Strategies, a bilingual consulting professional with ample experience in communications, government operations, community affairs, ethnic and community media advertising, and the print, digital, and broadcast media industries.
From January 2022 to May 2024, Bayona served as the founding Executive Director of the NYC Mayor’s Office of Ethnic and Community Media, the first-ever mayoral office of its kind in the United States. He advised the Mayor and city agencies to ensure the government reached multicultural audiences effectively in New York City. Before this, he served as spokesperson for Mayor Bill de Blasio and held the title of Director of Community and Ethnic Media and Deputy Press Secretary at the Mayor’s Office, where he managed communications for 20 city agencies.
At City Hall, Bayona also supervised the implementation of Local Law 83 of 2021, which set a goal for city and mayoral agencies to spend at least half their annual advertising budget on ethnic and community media. He also managed NYC’s Ethnic and Community Media Marketing Directory for advertising purposes, which includes more than 340 media outlets citywide.
Bayona spent most of his journalism years at the New York Daily News, where he started as a community reporter for the Spanish weekly Hora Hispana. Later, he was a writer for NY1 Noticias and Metro Editor for El Diario NY before getting into city government as deputy press secretary for the NYC Department of Transportation and press secretary for the NYC Administration for Children’s Services. He has also worked with non-profit organizations in creating their communications and content strategy, and as an adjunct professor for Hofstra University and The City University of New York’s Baruch College. City and State Magazine’s 2023 Power of Diversity: Latino Power 100 list of accomplished leaders recognized him for his work.
A native of Colombia with Venezuelan roots, Bayona holds an M.A. in Journalism from the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism – Urban and Interactive reporting concentrations – and graduated Cum Laude from the CUNY Baccalaureate for Unique and Interdisciplinary Studies in Journalism and Political Science from Baruch College. He also has years of experience working in theater and film from living in Venezuela.
Since arriving in the United States 28 years ago, Bayona has lived in Queens, the most diverse place on earth. There, he enjoys the gastronomic offerings from many cultures (cooking is one of his passions!) and the unmatched taste of Argentinian Malbec, his favorite red wine.
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