so i am excited too excited to be co hosting this then i'm excited to see so many people that i genuinely like and respect i'm glad to be in community with in  i'm excited to be in the space the central library which is one of my very favorite places in seattle and i'm excited there were commemorating world radio day today by celebrating a low power  the power of radio isn't something that's new to me one of my earliest memories being a refugee living here in america is my own parents my own community huddled over radios to get whatever news that they could get about what was happening back home and so radio has always played a big role in my own life i learned about low power f m and opportunity that to apply for low power fms when i was doing community organizing work one america which is the largest immigrant advocacy organization in washington state and when i thought about the opportunity the fact that we can create you know like get people in the community to produce content and air content and share information i immediately thought of the communities that i worked with which were newer immigrants and refugees from different countries in south king county who spoke tons of different languages who some were unable to read couldn't read english or speak english and weren't even able to read in their own languages i thought it would be great if we had something like my parents when we first came to america to share information not about what's going back home necessarily but what's happening in their own communities in languages the they could understand and so it was kind of a no brainer introduce the person actually introduced low power family me and probably some other folks in the room my very good friend brown paper tickets do or  structure public internet and sort of midway through the event we'll show you some new logos that are in process for local campaign about that and the name that well it's world radio day so it's you know ask those world radio day a day that they created a few years ago to help us remember to recognize how important this is  south africa was essentially a pirate radio broadcaster while apartheid was in effect when apartheid came apart busch radio became a legal radio  similar i love his quote that community radio is ninety percent community and ten percent radio you agree with me yeah yeah  good so tonight we're celebrating all the area applicants in the puget sound community radio cohorts and you might be asking yourself well what what's that and essentially it's a learning community it's a group of folks who have been meeting and sharing resources and ideas and excitement and tonight they will be sharing some of that with you we also have some local journalist who's written pieces on low power f m and i think fallen in love with it along the way there are also some community organizers and folks who make other forms of media who are excited about partnerships folks work with these groups of folks they're very passionate and i think you're going to see that this evening so as we go on everyone just wanted to say i'm very very excited to see tac washington south seattle and south king county areas and we'll be looking at serving the somali american and latino american communities first and foremost one of the most exciting things for me is that we'll be able to provide them programming in their own language and culturally relative programming that will really speak to their experiences not only as immigrants but also as americans living in a community in america it's also incredibly important  very exciting for us that our community will be able to help those in generating programming and help us to generate actual programs that they want to see so that it's not really going to be a top down effort where where we're deciding what the programming is but we're going to be having them decide and possibly execute the programming to one cool ideas like student mondays or something like that where student issues will be able to be a dress at a specific given time i had a cool idea where we could have epics culture here in america my parents are immigrants and i deal with the immigrant community quite often and let me tell you i'm sure i can say this firsthand of course but it's from all appearances it seems to be a very very scary experience to leave your home country and come into the great unknown that is america and whatever the f m radio station be able to do in to make it more welcoming and inclusive environment for them is is just the most exciting thing ever if you ask me i mean imagine you're coming all the way across the world and you get in your car and you turn on the radio and then you're having programming in your own language and culturally relative programming that really speaks to you in a in a fashion that  you can relate to and that your whole community can relate to another issue that we hope to address is that mainstream media outlets i love you all but oftentimes some of the more granular issues that plague the immigrant refugee communities of south king county tend not to be covered with the amount of depth that the community would like to offer and so that's why it's increasingly crucial that these communities end up creating their own everyone to tune in about one year we hope when when our station goes live and hear some really authentic somali american and latino american  programming i think that's pretty much all i have to say on that i didn't use up all my time thanks everyone i just wanted to talk about when i first heard about famine which was  a couple years ago i guess someone from vancouver ticket barber who i feel in the back a had read a story that i wrote for the stranger about some neighborhood media stuff and have i got a story about neighborhood media for you usually when publicist kahl me about a thing it's not really anything like a write about this for our sake and this was something that was about the community but i was the very new journalist journalist i didn't know i was doing it was maybe my second or third story that i was trying to pitch and when you pitch stories or to pitch them to your editor and the other news writers so i was kind of nervous bringing this story to a meeting and that's because it didn't have enough conflict an anger i was worried that i wouldn't be able to sell it as an interesting story because everyone i talked to you about was so excited and so positive and just so much they like it's one hundred watts the power of a light bulb it's going to be a radio station in your neighborhood to be all these new voices and be diverse content and i was obviously excited about it and i was going to sell this to my colleagues it's like a story in the paper because maybe they want to people yelling at each other about something or like something about some politician being mad and blocking someone from doing something and this is a story about a bunch of all coming together and solving a huge problem and working their way through political sphere to make this possible and then coming together to make amazing beautiful things so i went to a meeting and i said hey i just heard some interesting stories from some people who are trying to make a bunch of tiny radio stations all over the city that are going to have community content they're going to be competing right on the radio dial with the big corporate stations and they're going to be people telling their own stories on the air and every week every one of the pitch meetings like what they're going to be so it's it's like a light bulb it's time radio station tell me more like tell me more about this and i got to be honest it could be there's not like a bad guy i mean i guess corporate media is a bad guy but really this is a bunch of people being positive and working on something amazing and they're like i don't care we're going to blow it up it's going to be a full page fault tell me more about of these stations everyone super excited and now couple years later it's finally a real thing that's coming to fruition in a way that at the time it was an idea and i am no longer at the newspaper i now work for working washington we unite working p both to fight for a fair economy make our own lives better and a lot of the work that i do now is helping people tell their own stories directly to other people and connect with other people so obviously i am very excited about the possibility of all these tiny little light bulbs all over the city in the region telling people stories that's it is basically trying to get the news out in the true sense of news more not as a business not as a forum for propaganda but as a service to the community that it's  reporting about and south seattle has an incredibly diverse community and the emerald reveals that through the the articles we write about their culture and the arts and the actual events that are adding kind of from the communities perspective it's working basically as a counter argument against the prevailing  media that's out there discussing southern seattle and as a member of the community i live in south seattle i can fully testified to the fact that it's a necessary media outlet because it really does more of what the community is experiences down in the south and verses kind of the way that the mainstream media and just local seattle news would talk about events for example like the  jail and the sort of protests and resistance to that largely stemming from the south seattle community doesn't get much attention in on you know that's a komo news but there's plenty of outlets there are plenty of work coming out of south seattle emerald giving giving perspective of what it's actually like for the people that are most affected by these issues and we're really excited about these low power f m collaboration's with a news outlet like ourselves because it gives more opportunity to sort of service the community that would be  affected in would contribute and also be the most the the ones that need need to hear you know it's frustrating to see something going down and then club they actually started themselves they started following me around you and i stand up that's one of the saddle boys with an eye and there's not a lot of representation of queer and trans people of color in the media and so i wanted to start off with a quote  lord one of our ancestors if you don't believe yourself bleat don't define yourself for yourself then you will be crushed into others fantasies of a view and even alive so i sometimes when i'm thinking about media justice and i was introduced to this term by sabrina roach and i'm so appreciative of sabrina roach and all the work that she's done because she was one of the people that brought us to the allied media conference and this term is something that i moved towards when i think about movement and it's actually something that brings me joy when i think about the things that happened this year in regards to black lives matter there's a lot of anger and frustration and media justice and radio and community radio something that gives me hope because it connects the community and for me through how earth radio and how earth radio started in two thousand and seven and something that's great about how or if it started in a basement and gary kelly he's over here to the left he's the tech for today started with his why amber and this belief and how on earth where it got its name and acronym start you can say her h e r and that was very intentional is the space between the south and north pole and it's this imaginary space of the unknown and so what hollow earth tries to do is like uncover those voices and those stories that are not being told or even the music in the genre as that people say are not important and so entering the hollow or if space is like very welcoming when you go there there's this poster that says forgot everything that i was saying but one of the things that i love more than anything is like hip hop and so like to give it up to them they have one of the longest community shows b c s that's unveiling sorry bellevue and so when i think about like media justice and what the possibility of these years of struggle of people bringing l p f and i'm like trying to get people excited like this is so cool you don't even understand it's like we can create our own images and our voices and we can actually tell the truth about who we are and as a as a cutie pie person voice and visibility is this thing and like i would challenge everybody when you think about diversity it's also in regards to gender it's also in regards to race and ethnicity as well as culture there's a deeper sense of who we are so when i think about the work that garrett and amber and what sabrina has done is like they had this belief and they actually out of nothing created something and like all of you all are here today right and now we're like broadcasted and like alexis's mom i have to bring alexis is mom because she's listening right now hi auntie every time on on some radio show i have to say shout out to my auntie is like listening all the way in new york and when i think about the shows that i've done and the artists that i would like to bring on the show or the many organizers like people can learn about each other because the media is not talking about us and so when i think about like the possibility of like somebody that's in palestine or the philippines or cuba listening to ourselves or stories that you believe that you're not alone when talking about the root of the power of the radio show it's just that even when we think about what happened in ferguson that they were not alone and like that gives people the motivation saying like your dreams your possibilities or even how how earth was founded like this  fairy land in between is that we can actually create that and we're actually you know we're not just unicorns we are that unicorn we can you know we can make ourselves visible and our truth is that's what i'm excited about but in the fall hopefully we will have our entire installed and everything will be going smoothly so it's very exciting so i'm going to just start off with a brief history we were known as and then we undertook this opportunity for a famine march of twenty thirteen and we purchased new equipment and everything we are still in the basement we're still in a basement or if we are still in a basement as well so i mean like you  e but we are in the basement of a dorm building on campus and we really are trying to reach out to the community beyond our campus first but what's such a big push for us is trying to get all the students and all of the community on campus involved first and foremost because there are a lot of people who never knew that we even had a radio station in the past few years so we're really trying to make it a more professional more involved environment for and for our students and and more and also importantly trying to reach out into the community be on ourselves but we have hot had a lot of press which is really exciting and we are trying to transform the excess you like manuals and just everything is it's like we're working really hard right now on a lot of stuff so it's really fun but some of the things that we're trying to think of include having multiple level d j tiers of it there can be levels of involvement there working in our radio i mean on our internet on our website so that we can have blogs and missions and get involved with not just music but more like  social justice thing blogs because also set in versity is a jesuit school and we're really really involved and really like to be to recognize social justice as well as environmental justice and justice in particular so i you has a really strong holding that we could possibly that we could put forth to the community beyond excess you including the surrounding neighborhoods with getting overseas euthanasia tive and whatnot trying to really latch on to the young people around  versity but so i just want to leave with thanking everybody for the chance for kicks you to be involved in something like this we are very eager and we have our eyes and our ears open and we are ready to learn about what we can do to create a greater community beyond said university so i think you quick second to give some cliff notes basically there throughout seattle there is a hardware pipeline for high speed broadband i think it's the capacity to serve high speed broadband this actually controlled by the city so we'll actually be a public utility that would allow for a service to be accessed you know by a lot of communities and don't have it currently so right now we have centrelink wave and comcast and you've got your choice of three variables of evil i can say when i wa and video photography to youth i produce film and videos for clients and private and public sector in education sector so you know my my business is very data heavy you know and so i literally you know can exist unless i have really good reliable broadband access i work from home my studios are my home my office is in my home my clients are all over the  region ninety percent of my communication whether i'm just talking to people to you know to line up potential jobs or delivering jobs you know is transferred over the internet what i would like is to be able to and then a lot of my colleagues also are in the same situation so the people that i work with to produce the media that i need to deliver to my clients also work in the same situation as i do so an ideal situation for me and the reason why i got involved in this was that  i need for everyone that i'm working with or working for to have equal access to to the media ways ok and if everyone doesn't have equal access then essentially there is no access for anyone that's my take on the issues i see i have one thousand seconds or something but yeah that's why i'm going to so come check us out we can talk more about it in detail it's a really big issues kind of complex you know it's all about it's very political you know because the corporate powers don't want the kind of competition so we really need a lot of public support in order to get this thing off the ground and make sure that it's a reality so  gray seattle is the new name of the campaign the brain is one of my closest friends and when she tells me to show up at something i show up but i never know exactly what i'm supposed to talk about so i'm going to i made i mean it's trying to put it all together but i am very excited about the great seattle because apes it's the power of the internet and our hands it's local it's something that we can literally go to our city council members if we have a problem and safe fix it and if you don't fix it i'm a registered voter and you know and so i feel like it's so all of my career and i have been working in media justice for quite a long time sometimes paid mostly unpaid but one of the things that i have really always believed in and i've taught my children this is our power to tell our own stor because we are experts and what we need and low power f m and mean it's a pope broadband are just two different ways for us to be able to tell our story and our own voice because we are our own experts and i think one of the things that got me invited here was a has anybody ever been to a barn raising right ok so the first time i heard about a bar i will make this very short but the first time i heard about a barn raising i was like whoo whoo ok because people would say things like my life has changed i have you know i built a community radio station barn raising is a term that is used when people a community gets together and actually builds a radio station and you know i along with the other people in the room who raise their hands and some of whom were with me  who originally were buying radio time on the local radio station and when that local radio station found out that they were actually using the airwaves to organize they basically kicked them off now shortening the story because i only have three minutes and i think evan has the one minute sign and so literally people from all over came together and there were babies and children and food and spanish speakers all over the place and this community of brown people got together and invited their friends and supporters to help them build a radio station and i remember that day i had another event that i had to come back to in seattle so i had to leave right after the radio station went on the air and as i was driving away i realized that there were tears streaming down my eyes because this community had realized what it needed to be strong to be powerful and to and to continue do the important work that they needed to do using the power of the airwaves and i'm so excited and so looking forward to cheer i've been through neighborhoods all over seattle and hearing what's going on in this neighborhood and what's going on in that neighborhood and having all of these micro radio stations tuned into my dial and participating in the wind and rain or valley because that is my neighborhood  as either a contributor a supporter or a listener and what i'm hoping is that everybody gets staff on with these small lp f m radio stations because it really is transformative and it really is thank you i actually wrote some stuff because i wanted to make sure i grind all my axes in my three minutes so and there's a lot of them in this city my involvement in media just just started for completely selfish reasons which was that i moved to beacon hill and the only internet provider i have there available to me is century link which is terrible this should be around the city my my internet speed is one point eight four mil bytes per second the national average is eighteen so i'm running at about a tenth the national average in the internet is city in the country and so all in doubt insult to injury i live less than three miles away from the centrelink paid seventy five million dollars to name ok so every time i draw it's like a middle finger right my face every time i view the beautiful panorama of seattle so so that was my starting point and i started making these videos and as i got deeper and deeper into the issue it kind of explored it the story got bigger and bigger and uglier and i found that if you were to overlay a map of the worst served internet neighborhoods in seattle over a map of historically red line neighborhoods in seattle those that were segregated they match up almost exactly like you could just almost place them right on top of each other  undeniable that municipal broadband is a social justice issue obama recently said that it should be treated as a utility just like electricity or water and i agree i hope that our friends at the mayor's office and city light will wrap their heads around that concept soon enough the more i write about seattle the more i realize that almost any story about the changes taking place in seattle are about gentrification and displacement and if you don't cover that you're not telling the whole story you're not you're not really telling the whole truth who's getting who's getting moved in who's getting pushed out that's the entire story of our city it's also about civic spending priorities city light budget about a half a billion dollars to utility upgrades for the tech companies of south lake union which is about what it would take to supply municipal broadband to every household in seattle so that's that's that's where your money's going also you know we spent over four hundred million dollars for each of our shiny new stadiums and we're still paying off the kingdom which was demolished in two thousand so civic spending priorities also you know a few days ago king county finalized their contract with the howard s right company the people that brought you the space needle who are now building a brand new two hundred ten million dollar youth jail so i think that's an interesting symbolism for our city let me try to tie all that together all of that brings me to why i love l p f him which is that if him is a force that runs counter completely counter to every one of these trends i just discussed you know it it fights gentrification or just placement by getting communities an actual physical hub to pull people together and also by giving a voice to those who have been displaced so they can return to their neighborhood via the airwaves and most importantly you don't need comcast or century link sucky internet service to listen to it you can just turn on the  radio l p s fights against the ongoing march of corporate media consolidation by carving out its own space it goes head to head with massive media conglomerates on the level playing field of the radio dial and it basically embodies everything i value lately which is it's funky and it's often weird cough cough hollow earth radio it's hyper local and it's real in a way that corporate media will never be and it gives me access to voices in conversations i everyone that's a question you can answer back how is everyone right i would like to talk with you about rain or valley radio our humble beginnings and where we'd like to go start off by talking about the group that owns the license which is seat southeast effective development southeast affected development has been a good steward of southeast seattle's communities for over forty years they do this to a collaborative community approach which is done through several different ways a few of which i mention and that is to affordable housing creation also neighborhood revitalization and also by providing cost cultural arts opportunities and i talked about rainier valley radio which is what we're really here for bringing value radio our mission is to be a media center to serve southeast seattle's diverse communities and we'll do this by providing content creation from our community the community will be the voice of the radio station radio valley is a different place if you will very unique seventy one percent of our community members are not white much like the opposite of what's in this room which is why we are doing some things that we think are very important i think that everyone has the opportunity to do by showing leadership one of the things that we've done is go to the city council which has a process called the council condition cost about ten thousand dollars we took the initiative to get that changed to administrative use which is about three thousand dollars which saves and sets a precedent for all of the o p s hymns each one of assessing l p s him has the ability to lead and move forward on changing things that our society in many different ways that's one of the beauties of this l p f the movement another thing that we've done is to use our community resources what community resources on top and i talking about i'm talking about our youth we started a program called the creative arts digital media academy for junior and middle high school junior mill schoolers and high schoolers this program takes the students through communications college level course work journalism understanding ethics and laws which are in this manner standing difference between opinion based writing and what you would call an biased writing we talk about the legal and ethical sensibilities we teach them how to build websites we teach them about the rise of social media which teach them about presentation because if we're going to have people on the radio if we're going to have people who impact radio on air and off the air we have to give them the skill set the twenty first century skills to understand what radio is today and also to be providers of media content we have to teach them about journalism how do you expect people to communicate if they don't have the tools to communicate we all have voice we all have narrative to shale share sharing that narrative is also part of making it understandable for people from different backgrounds to understand in our community we serve about eighty thousand people eighty thousand people slot folks we have a broad range of folks we have to get to forty different ethnicities and cultures sixty different languages we look forward to this challenge we think that if we can accomplish this this is a microcosm of the world today this is what we need to make happen this is what we need to do and i hope that all of us as films recognize the importance of diversity the importance of thought the importance of shared narrative to make good evening hello my name is just tina and i never want to be on the radio i wanted i am affiliated activist i'm a resident of rainier valley and i'm a founder of reiner valley radio a few years ago i read an article maybe the one you talked about earlier with the information about a low power in for low power f m stations and i made a wish i wish for a radio station with the power to build community and i'm so excited about the hyper local broadcasting possibilities and the ability to mobilize i want to thank jerry plumber from seed the art director as i went around rainier valley saying to anyone i saw do you want to radio station do you want to radio station do you want to radio station let's make a radio station how about a radio station jerry was the one that said yes and here we are with a license a construction license i understand that the theme this year is set by unesco is youth so i want to make a call out to  all of the youth of rainier valley this is a call out to you all the beautiful corky shy intelligent powerful strong youth of rain or valley show up make a wish for what you want show up keep showing up even when it's not fun we meet the third tuesday of every month at the rainier valley cultural center on the southwest corner of alaska and rainier show up take ownership take ownership of the station the governance in operations of this station can be in your hand and thank you all high i want to say i am so thrilled to be here and to see the flourishing of democracy that l p s them has created and i want to thank all the folks at brown paper tickets for supporting that  we may be the oldest radio station in the group my hair was brown and we started fourteen years ago to get an lpn fam license and voice of fashion is all about community our community is white old hippies who live in rural king county and we try to speak to them in their language and we try to let them know that there's a lot more diversity on vashon island than they might realize in the fourteen years that we have spent trying to get an f m license in the meantime we managed to create internet radio and voice of org we got a t v station channel twenty one comcast channel twenty one and we created a traveler's information service six hundred fifty am for merge and see alerts for ferry disruptions for god forbid if there's a big one voice or vashon island will be isolated so that that is one of the primary reasons we wanted a radio station but we all we also wanted it because voice a vest on is a community of choice vashon island is a community of choice the people who choose to be there we have learned our incredibly talented they bring amazing stories and we want to showcase all those stories we also want to showcase and do showcase the artists the activists the not for profit organizations the people who are helping the homeless people on vashon island the people who are poverty stricken on vashon island yes indeed there are those people the minorities the hispanic community the community our programming is done by all volunteers and they all come from that community we were ready in august when we got our license to go on the air so we got our license in august and we launched our broadcast october thirteenth and we've been on the air twenty four seventh's since then yeah and we intend to stay that way but as you're all going to learn it's a constant fundraising effort you're always going to be asking people for money but the cool thing is if you believe in what it is you're doing it really isn't hard to ask for money at all  and we definitely believe that there's a need on vashon island for community radio a community showcase and it is just like those radio stations in all of your communities  you're speaking to your communities you're speaking about your communities your programming is coming from your communities that is what l p s am is all about and it is designed and should keep democracy and live in this country where we're not too sure we're going to get to keep democracy so again thank you all thank you brown paper tickets thank you sabrina and thank you all for the hard work that you are doing and it is hard work i know to keep  running and to keep your communities alive and vital thank you very much ok well hi guys i'm from you wave radio and i'm going to start off with our mission statement you wave radio is you know bottles campus based community radio station of the bottle area and beyond we are a center for community engagement  under represented voices and and music an environment for professional development and a catalyst for show social justice i became involved with you wave radio about two years ago and when i started i had no idea what anything about radio was about and i found my niche within the promotions department and it worked my way up to be the promotions co director and i've learned event planning which is much crazier than i ever thought it would be for a simple small event like pumpkin carving and seeing and collaborating with other organizations on campus and that was all very hectic very very amazing opportunity and i'm not unique in the sense that i was open or i was of these opportunities are available to me we have so many opportunities within our radio station for any community member or any you tube awful member who wants to get involved we really want to stress our community involvement and community engagement and we're very excited for once we get on the f m dial we should have a much bigger listenership in people who are just driving in their car flipping through the radio station my land on you wave and all of a sudden wow this is my new favorite station a lock this in and that would just be a really great thing and we will be able to draw in more people who want to donate their music so that we can highlight them and highlight events going on within our community not just bottle but the greater seattle area and we are just very very excited to be able to be part of this community radio and yeah i think that's all i have for now everybody congratulations on your way and i got to love pm who's out there who's got one all right yes i make noises like radio with real girls what we're trying to do is definitely shift culture through content creation and that's why i believe you guys will be doing in the next few years and super exciting because in order for us to change our communities we've got to create and share the different like skills for young people so they they can navigate the world and share their opinions through video and i think two thousand and eight a group of girls put together a documentary questioning media consolidation and it is called console generation consolidation and i think that was a really awesome if if you haven't seen google real girls and generation consolidation because it really talks about like why it's important to not just have one one voice in need we need to have a ton of community forces in order to share the mazing resources stories that our communities provide so i'm hoping a lot of you will have youth programs i know radio active does a great job and i heard other folks talk about ensuring that you have a voice in their radio station so congratulations to everybody and we would love for any partnerships with real girls to look us up and thank you so much scarfs you know it's been really amazing just listening to what everybody else has to say i feel like actually most people have said what i wanted to say which but i'll just say briefly that's something that has been of great importance to me are two things one is connecting connecting with people in my community connecting and understanding other people's perspectives and their stories and i feel like this is a tool that will help us to do just that so i'm very excited about the things that you have to say about rainier beach especially particularly in terms of the seattle globalist we are tagline is where seattle meets the world and i feel like where i begin to meet the world is in rainier beach and often times while i've been living there for the last three years i'm still struggling to kind of get to know my neighbors and part of that has been because of the language barriers to my left my neighbors or vietnamese to my right there mexican across the street  somali and and since i don't have kids i don't have that natural like kind of point of connection with everyone else but i'm i'm hoping that this will be another place where we can really start to to get to know one another because that's where the most change happens is when we are able to really look and look from there from other people's perspectives and understand in some very excited and also i hate comcast so i had to write it down because i just did i'm really pleased to be here today back in two thousand and two when i started writing my thesis on things looked bleak for this form of community radio to be heard in bigger cities like seattle the f c c at the time was promising to study the interference question but it didn't look good for those forces advocating for first channel placement and yet here i stand thirteen years later at the launch of news stations in seattle i could not be more thrilled i'd like to do a few shout outs first of all to petri dish and his cohorts in west philly we're talking about barn raising and that was a brainchild of theirs they took on this initiative and they made it possible for ordinary people and small nonprofits to take to the airwaves he drove city to city and his rickety old station wagon meaning anybody that he could possibly need to encourage them to apply for a low power license in north hampton where i helped apply for a station here ridgeley met with three people one of whom was a homeless man who'd just come in out of the cold and you know at the time he didn't think it was going to lead to anything and today there's w x o j which back casts out of florence massachusetts i got to witness the process of l a free radio put in the application and i got to come back and help organize the conference in two thousand and five and it was truly magical experience getting people just to even be welding the pieces together and plugging in the equipment and i had  eyes as i sat there on that afternoon people came from all over musicians and they played the afternoon away and it was truly truly beautiful and if you want to learn more about low power history my m shirley and jonathan ross and reclaim the media for putting pressure on our elected officials to better represent us as citizens not just as consumers media policy is created it isn't just administrated we can continue to find ways to bring our voices to the airwaves what fascinated me about the launch of low power radio was getting to see the underbelly the political side of media policy on the one side you had william canard really wanting to leave a legacy of representing the little guys of radio and you had telecommunications act in one thousand nine hundred sixty doing a wholesale buyout of radio as we knew it the national association of broadcasters on the other side were attacking the low power f service and it really exposed to us inner workings of us media policy and some point for us to remember that we can affect change it just requires hercules and efforts and i'd like to conclude by saying i love radio at its best it's spontaneous unexpected and i can get sucked into topics of john and john or severe sick i would never seek out on my own when the visual drops away  engage with her ears and encourages a different type of processing encounters the image bombardments of the internet in the twenty four hour news cycle i worked at a community radio in the late one thousand nine hundred ninety s i learned so much and saw firsthand the magic that can happen and providing a space for people who come together and create it surely isn't without its challenges but these stations are essential and i'm so grateful to all of you for diving in head first and making low power vernon and also the hip hop music music director of and online radio station it's new to the region known as c out a way of radio that focuses on several different genres everything from latin music to hip hop and every artist here featured is from the northwest so you don't hear commercial anybody nobody's paying and you know it's not a pay the high is a better scheme and that's who gets the airplay that's now that's not how we do things and i wanted to speak on this theme of world radio day when it comes to youth you know i stand before you here today a living testament of the power of that but when i started in community media i was nineteen years old i had an aunt who had a broadcast at k c are ninety one point seven the fan who i was a guest on her show and i've been there ever since and that was a decade ago and now i have my own show and a community of just over one hundred thousand people that is a successful hip hop broadcast and public affairs program that's been heard in seven countries and on four different continents by someone giving me that voice by saying you know young man come in the studio you know you've got something to say let's let's let your voice be heard not only have i been able to do that i've been able to travel a lot for the radio station i personally have been to argentina i've been to jordan as a representative of not only the northwest but the united states and community radio we're actually i had a chance to meet a very distinguished gentleman mr zane friends that are soon to join the radio show you know you may seem like you're in a david and goliath type fight when it comes to the media in the corporate conglomerates that control it but you know what the one thing you have on your side is the truth you don't have somebody who's corporate monetary fund it agenda you're telling the stories of your community and your people to your community into your people by nobody else's agenda it is what it is like we don't be afraid to do it you know i mean in my own program i've done that from the local scene to just the other day with everything that's going on in the middle east with isis  and several countries i had some friends of mine call in because i wanted to tell americans hate men you know we don't say our religion you know just saying our people we don't support that you know we're people just like you and me to right on down to the local stories and issues that impact our community directly to international issues and again and a community of one hundred thousand people we're doing this you know what i'm saying so i'll leave you with those words for those of you new to you know what don't afraid to go big you know you let your voice be heard and bring that voice to your community that all of you believe