hi i'm a b g when you support community radio you support the community as well to support c h r y during its fund drive contact c h o y s two five zero seven zero one six three four one zero  good morning welcome to changes the program on sustainability i'm susan gregory the coordinating producer of the show and with me in the studio this morning is lorissa kozar one of the newer members of the changes team good morning stem now you've put together some audio pieces for today's show so tell us about them yes well we're currently on our fun drive and i thought i would go out and ask a few people do some interviews asking the question what's the value of radio and why is raid you important specifically community radio so i went out and i asked these questions to two great hosts here at c h l y which i'm sure you've heard their great show and that we also received just short piece from of the i used to didn't bryce garner and you'll be able to hear that piece today i also came to the radio and asked rb to take us on a audio tour of the station so you'll get to have an idea of how the station is organized and what we offer here so so we hear the first yes let's listen to dave to seven and so most of you have probably heard the show at one point or another and we're here talking a little bit about the value of radio in general but specifically also community radio hi dave the show in my original conception was international and fairly afrocentric so basically group based music comes from all over the world it could be music from africa or asia or the southern united states or from the caribbean or latin america or whatever our way to mix of the party is kind of i like it is like going to  because you're really introducing them to all this new music is that right when i was growing up one of my favorite titles for an album was the talking heads album released in the late seventies called fear of music because i noticed over my lifetime that people get stuck in their box and people think that they will only enjoy the music they know i've actually had people come up to me when i'm d same thing over and over again so when someone tells me that they don't know most of what i'm playing i take that as a compliment because i'm here to expose a new artist who will and bring new artists and to give people a taste of a lot and beg and plead and i really after all these years it gets tiring i really feel that our community should get behind these these things like community radio you know other places in the world there radio more than they do i would like to do less kind of encouraging and i'd like to be able to just go on during a fun drive and say hey it's our finder in fact we're not we're not supported just jury by brian we're we're  should wait till binder i have to support the station i think you should support it with your volunteer isn't with your sponsorship and with your donation yet a time found it were always surviving by the skin of our teeth we're always on the verge of bankruptcy and you can't serve the community if you're struggling on that well what have you seen is the value of community doing in how does it serve communities to ferbey me and my experience of community radio back east in toronto is that community radio have to have a conscience and a connection to the grassroots of this community there's a lot of different people that come to want to community radio would be much different than c b c radio and definitely much different than commercial radio so it's not about coming on and being a superstar destructive and just plain hits the made people laugh we're actually as media becomes more internet based digital base satellite based satellite company use like sirius adelaide they didn't you know make programs out of it just focus on that various people who are trying to do good things in the in the in this community for me and i can't speak for the state of large because what happens with these different community radio stations is they need to have a focus on these mandates  and address them as a as a collective regardless of what people do in their own in their own personal world somebody who's associated with a radio station regardless of what you do in your own personal way i think that community radio needs to take the higher ground it needs to set an example if you've got a radio show was talking about environmental issues about social justice issues and so on so for a radio station used to  associated self in those way so i really believe that the collective needs to make make a conscious effort to walk and talk support people in the community who are out there tague and and cultural initiatives and so on so they're really are in support of progress of progressive issues that help our community to involve evolve a positive way not out of coming and way this is our i'm going to play my favorite music sh my show even though i love presenting music i present music with a message and usually and the reason i call the love is because i was you know i had a big political brain and i see the things that are threatening the planet also am there to break new artists to support local artists to interview i try my best to fill the show with interviews with people who are who are making interesting music in our communities or people who are the that shows the the expanse of music that i'm into but also supporting arias in all those differences are who's winning this week on the show i have blum our viewers here in alberta blues duo who moved to the couch and money like the promoters risk their money on putting on a bad day and if they're not attended these people lose their might be the individual and i think the events that they raised there are money on enrich our community and so we need to support those the thing is that the community radio stations struggled quite a bit of seeing all those struggle in a way mostly financially it's still recently there's been no grass available for community stations now there old movies of the intrepid reporter who goes out to seek the truth for the behalf of the community at all costs that's become a myth of the guy and it's being killed by corporations because corporations want to do whatever they want to do you make money and so that includes polluting your neighborhood polluting yours unity you know who toxins in your water supply and so back in the day when people these intrepid reporters were breaking the news on  corporations doing bad things and breaking the law was gracious about what we have all about here why don't we just buy out the news organizations and then they can become our propaganda tools and they can say what we want anything that doesn't fit almost twelve years while living on getting a license for a small wattage community radio station it took them out on a fine and they didn't get a power up they didn't actually get a station constructed and then basically even though they a radio license just started producing some radio online yet my criticism about it there's no central hub where people gather to to have a community really you need community of overshadowed yeah and now all that work is for now and and that's what happens a lot of times you put this huge amount of work into trying to establish stations like the and then give the life to help them evolve and there's so many bumps in the road and if you don't get the right people running it or if you drop the ball in certain areas or if you don't handle your business right or you don't get the support of the five biggest one of the financial support then it can just disappear and then people don't realize what they've lost until they've already here and you know looking into the c r t c dad they did a report in two thousand and fourteen when dechen mean the radio is actually eleven percent provides eleven percent of all the radio and audio services in canada and you know we're all listeners of the c b c but actually c b c only provides eight percent so community radio actually provides more services canada you as someone who's been involved over many decades as i have there is no shortage of passion there's no shortage of intelligent people to get involved there's no shortage of people who want to make it work there's a shortage of financial backing and in this day and age where people have the internet we've gone from i pods and to a streaming society and so on and so for people to take this stuff for granted you know and yet there is also a many people out there who see the value of it and see the value of access a lot of people also see the media as something outside of themselves but we're swimming  and this is you the opportunity to become part of the media not to be dictated to by the media but actually be a reporter be a programmer be a voice for the radio bring your issues to your community through an electronic media voice it's a very powerful tool the corporations know it's a very powerful tool invest billions of dollars and propagandizing people so this is if you really i want to have a voice when when it comes think that it's really really an important thing to support those when they're the ones are going to be there for you when you need them yet you know we're being censored by all the other boats and you know i've been around a number of decades i'm listening to radio a lot of people get stuck in their era that this is what i've figured out as a d j this is my this is my theory because i play music to people all the time and what i've figured out is people there goes towards their teenage years or prior to when they became responsible adults when they had children and got married and had to go to work in support of the family the songs they love to before they did that represent their rebellious years that way is because commercial radio doesn't exist for you to listen to music that exists for you to listen to advertise and they can keep you locked in advertising does not work on a conscious level  sub conscious low t v ads if you turn the sound off the visual the new cd will still give you the advertising messages if you walk out of the room the audio will still give you the message if you're not paying attention  designed to see into your brain consciously so they don't care if you're paying attention to the radio actually they really prefer that you're not paying attention so after hearing the same taken care of business and you know brandy you're a fine girl and all these hit songs you know all these what it wonders that you've grown up with and they just play them day in and day out on the radio you go into a kind of sanabel this state where you're not really paying attention to the radio factor you can listen to your i pod or your you know your phone or whatever you can stream music on spotify that's all cool there's no one there talking to you and even the social animals they want to connect and so if you're alone and i think you're working on times training different parts of our lives we need that voice that comforts us and strangely but the radio can do that for you and i think with community radio those voices we hope that we can trust  they come from a higher place a higher consciousness i myself have my life has been greatly influenced by the shows that i've listened to and people that i've been involved with if you really all these years i became a vegetarian twenty five years ago i'm a vegan now that's strictly because of the programming that i heard on this unity radio there was an edge of my consciousness i had to do something about the way i live my life  concept of social justice how i try to keep my footprint light on this planet earth all comes from being enlightened by the people i know produce programming for for community radio so for me community radio like changer for what did you think i think that was war i and ranging and marvelous yes yeah i think it really showed the power that radio can have on people and he reminds us about the privilege of having a radio station in your town and how hard not to get a license and and how important is for us to support that yes and you've mentioned as well of the importance of radio in small communities where there may not be an internet connection but even in a place like the ny mall where we do have internet coverage in an emergency it's the radio that you turn to we have an emergency broadcast system when there's no power you can find information that's needed and actually even on the highway you'll see there are signs that give you the frequency of there's a sign that says c h o y one a one point seven f m yeah the highway radio is part of any risk management for any government so you have zero first of all we had better give the phone number to call the you've been hearing this for a while now on the station but two five zero seven one six three four one zero is the local number to call that gets you into the office here at the station and there are people out there who can talk with you so that you can make your pledge to support this radio station for all the reasons that they've all rama mentioned or if you are not right here in the you can call one eight five five seven four zero one zero one seven and the same people will be happy to take your call you can also of course check our web site c h l y dot ca where it's very easy to find the donate page and you can take care of your donation right there it's optional to make a monthly donation that is greatly appreciated but if your circumstances only permit a one time donation or if you want to make your monthly donations all together in one fell swoop you can do that as well just make one big donation and we will appreciate everything that comes in through the website or the phone numbers know you have a sure of the station yes are going to take us on a little tour so open your imagination and listen closely we're here writing friend of chile radio with rb he's the program director and also music director here in this the radio station and he is going to usual office stuff lots of computers and which we use for sound editing as well as other printing invoices and all that sort of monday in jazz where there's the magic of the radio happened where this all the music production and recording happen  well either in the river in the booth or we have a small production studio in the back i think the magic's here on the wall because around the corner here we have our twenty thousand her so c see not all of them are actually are here actually we've got some of them in storage now because we ripped a lot of it because we're running out of room one of these days one of these days we'll be moving just because we need more room yes so as a music director i have a question so how do you get rights to play all these music well basically every radio station has every anybody has the rights to  play recordings if you play them for profit then you have to pay you know they would be senseless to put out music and not give rights to play it so we pay to various collection agencies so can and resound for various parts of those rights there's performance rights for the performers there's the composers rights because lots of times the composer and the performer are not the same person so each of them get a little bit of a bit of money yeah but you know basically they want to play it so they go by it and so how digitizing and then the last six years we tried to catch up so we're still not caught up you know it's just so again how many cities are we looking at here rb about twenty thousand i figure between here and the stuff it might be a little bit and there will depend on them they probably get the radio up kind of loud in there to tell them about what they are mostly working off their own laptop at the moment playing music over the air that's where  our mixing board is and you know it's the beginning part of the air chain the microphones and the and the mixing board and whatever you've got whether you're playing on c d s or whether you're playing p three s or you know through the back we've got like i say we took over another room in the queens we have a small recording studio back there yeah sure yeah so we're just heading into another production studio fire back here we've got a couple of microphones we've got a mac mini set up here and in a mixing mixing device actually spare one over there in the corner to which we use this room for quiet recording like of ads or other such things like that or things like this there's a really fancy mike here the ones you know we seem in movies right when they're doing the news  that's a road it's not a bad one it's a couple hundred bucks the other ones are older mikes they've been kicking around here for a while we used to use this one in the studio which is a berenger c one and this one here is a berenger as well i think it's a nice little mike for picking up instruments it's with main thing it's for so there's a lot of equipment in here and lot of different tools that we could use to to make some audio and music playing and so we're in the fun drive anything you want to say you know you're more of the operation side of the the whole piece anything you want to say t well yeah it doesn't really to me it doesn't really matter about operation so much as it does what we're here for here for to be local we're here to present things that aren't don't have a place in other commercial medium whether it's t v or whether it's whether it's radio or and that's that's what we're here for is to bring forward views and music and everything that don't get played much anywhere else now sometimes people tend to still want to play grateful dead or you know stuff that's that's older or you know but even that we have are for nothing if not for you guys you know for the community we get some from the college but we can't do it just from a college university it has to be from the community as well and we are the community yes exactly and we're trying to be more and more and more and more you know but it's that takes money and resources and that it's slowly happening great things  yeah i like being king that we are the community then and the community is us to yeah we are made up of people from the community as well as the university so indeed there's a it's a very back and forth relationship i just want to say we have increasing support of the community our fund drive is at eight thousand four hundred twenty nine so keep those calls coming i think you so much for your arran wednesday morning and we're going to talk a little bit about the value of radio broadcasting in all the good stuff that ash has been doing for a while here so do you wan tell us a little bit about your show sure my program runs every wednesday morning like you said from eight to nine and it's just a variety and call it a variety hour because there is music there is there's talk there's  cool clips things i find on the internet good music that's just come out local music local voices and it's been on the air for about three years and i just really love doing it you know i don't get paid to do it i do it as a volunteer and i really love to i really love to do it every week because it seems like there is just so much good music that comes out from all around the world and lots of really interesting topics that we deserve to have access to and that's kind of i feel a little bit of my responsibility to share with with anyone who's listening so how do you start broadcasting when you do decide to do you want to do your own radio show where i was really inspired i grew up in toronto i was really inspired by this the child empire that grew out of this tiny little am radio station ten  to get into that kind of stuff because i remember being a little kid and maryland and it's coming on the radio into my bedroom every morning indra it's like she's my friend you know visiting again and i got to enjoy  personality like every morning and it was really cool because radio is just it's around us all the time you know it's like literally these radio waves are pulsing through every square inch around us and it just takes the most simple little device to pick it up and it's so excessive bull that's i kind of like the difference between like in media as now there is there used to be this huge disparity between media producers and media consumers but nowadays with the internet and you tube anybody is a media producer anybody is a media consumer now and relating that radio with the and how i forget there's like some some statistics i think you're telling me that was like about twenty percent people listen to the radio like fifty percent of canadians are watching you tube for music which is really unfortunate because you tube actually has a horrible sound quality don't call it a yes or really depriving ourselves canadians are listening to music over you too that it's kind of at a level that we don't really even you know you think maybe you can notice the difference oh there's a big difference yeah well live streaming which people might think is what most people are getting their music from right is actually below radio so radio is about twenty percent and live streaming eighteen percent of listeners show yeah yeah yeah oh i believe it yeah i mean like it goes back to the accessibility thing the simple little device to pick up the frequency exists in wise it's a campus and community of listeners supported so it's very different than all of the other stations on the dial i remember when i first moved to ny most seven years ago my boyfriend listens to c h o i he still of you know a week later a week went by and they raised think it was like twenty five or thirty thousand dollars and they reached their goal and and then all the programming started coming back because of course for the fun drive we have to suspend and the regular programming and replace it with efforts to raise the funds to keep it all going so that they return to their regular broadcasting in and was this amazing music always is really amazing is that i never heard on mainstream media before in fact that's all my exposure to media had always been mainstream and so right around that time like i said this is seven years ago my whole life changed the idea as the information in the news and the art that was coming out of that really really directed my whole entire life and purpose and everything so i really don't mind giving over all of my time planning my show and executing my show every week for free because the theater has given so much to me and it's made so much of a difference in my life yeah so the show we're doing a little looking into the value of community radio to just remind us of how important the services to the community was just and in the yeah yeah and so do you want to see a little bit about that difference between community radio and mainstream radio and what does community bring that's unique to community radio bring that's unique well there's an there's an element to this it's campus and community radio is the designation right across canada and universities have this student media that is really the ground there's all this grassroots information that's coming out there in the and it's really easy to see the difference between corporate media and campus community media it's it's that one is driven by profits and the programming is so downloaded and homogenized that it doesn't ever want you to change the it doesn't it doesn't want you to challenge your ideas don't you never they never want you to change the channel because then you won't be hearing their advertisements and it's their advertisements that i suppose are still driving sales and this is how they get all of their money and and commercial radio stations operate on hundreds of thousands of dollars annual budgets and c h l y is like so much less than that it's like so shoestring so when you look at the value here you have all these stations that are just playing this mediocre music all of these tunes we've heard over and over and over again just because it's safe and because you get these big blaring commercial breaks every ten minutes and and campus and community need it's like the opposite of that it's just wants to deliver the the richness of the culture that has resulted in this part of the world  l i broadcast to forty coastal communities all over canada's west coast this is a really rich part of the world and so like voices from all over this area is is really where the value comes through because with a lot of these commercial stations they're being programmed elsewhere and in the world they're not being programmed from these towns from the cities that we're hearing them in they're being just basically it's like a computer makes up the playlist of all the safe songs and the representatives all have their ad clients in the localized areas and that's how they make their cash that's why they have all this cash that's why they don't have to suspend programming and replace it with people like reminding people like you know even though it seems like radio is free it does cost a little bit for us to keep on going that's why it actually read really counts to put five bucks a month down on having this really alternative delivery of information that is underrepresented even misrepresented omitted in the mainstream media and where it really interesting times right now listen you work with changes radio on every week we hear and suzanne gregory's been doing so much great work on that show and bringing on new people like you and talking about things that actually matter that have such deep relevance and especially at this time  this period in history really big things are happening there are massive changes and we need access to that information we need to keep it available and you know it's actually really frustrating and sad to know the reality of how close the little stations like c h l i actually are teetering on the edge of like not being able to to do what it does anymore or or being dismantled this way or that and so it's like the only barrier we have is kashmir and i say that i'm not i'm not just a volunteer who's been doing this show for the last few years i actually worked for c h l i was in a management position for years and i know all of the inner workings and stuff and i know how scarily close we are to not being able to deliver these amazing ideas this incredibly important news these what what's motivated these volunteers is passion it's the passion for like informing you and for sharing because a lot of what's on c h l is pure art a lot of this music a lot of spoken word in this yeah so it's like you have this two piece like art information all of this is like these are messages of love and truth and it has nothing to do with profit has nothing to do with making a rich people richer or consuming more useless products it's about informing people to the nature of their behavior and that's a really important thing to have and about art yeah and that's one piece maybe tell the listeners a little bit about how people can become media producers and as you were saying that's very empowering i mean it's being very empowering for me the it was a big success of will to people people can go on the radio and make their own stories and air them and when you're good you're being heard by well like this is such an important time in history with our availability to technology and our availability to the internet this is the main driving vehicle of  media production there is there isn't this huge gap between media consumers and media producers anymore we are all able to produce media and with this technology we have so many people have it right in their right in their pocket the audio quality that you can download an app for your i for your i phone it's like it's really good audio quality you could just open up make a recording and you could be on c h l i think it's like literally that easy that's one of the things that motivated me to do the sweet and sour variety hour i wanted it to be a place where community the members can produce segments on a regular semi regular basis and it's their spot it's their opportunities their microphone to the people in their area and there have been a lot of people have taken me up on that offer i've had lots of different segments on on the program over the years and i feel like it's you know like  it could be i could do a better job of making sure people know that's available but that's what we're doing right now and anyway you know the accessibility part is that anybody can be a media producer the this is the cool part about it so if you were going to pitch community radio what would you say if i were to we need to keep our radio you our community radio we need to protect it we when you support it what is your pitch ok so protecting community radio is all about supporting both those who are producing it all of the volunteers and also by recognizing that c h l why is listener supported meaning that it's listener funded the money that comes in some of it's from v you students some of it's from advertising but the most important part about the funding that comes in is from donors during these fun drives we only do it twice a year we could be doing it all the time it could be asking all the time and a lot of the programmers are they do remind their listeners that they are listeners supported and that to make a donation any time but we are this is why we're suspending the regular program we have to spend this time now to ask people to actually pony up a couple of dollars like money is kind of hard to come by these days and so it's a lot to ask for some people that you know to give five dollars or ten dollars or do something monthly and yet also it's like it's by by doing that you feel good about participating in it you can actually you are accountable then to this endeavor the endeavor of keeping independent media rocking and rolling in your area because just actually just takes a few a few dollars to support community radio thank you so much when's the last time you guys listened to the radio cool thing a cool part about community radio is that you get to hear the same personalities week after week and it's like you become friends with them a little bit that's kind of how i feel about the programmers that i hear during my favorite shows on c h and today's it's nice because a lot more local stuff along radio or television won't really cover local stuff so that's where it is important because you can get local news from local stations in your community and you do get like an authentic kind of local  in community matters to keep tabs on them hear about them throughout the day for example if it's something is really traffic even you can kind of keep posted on what's going on traffic wise