are very lucky to have with us live in the studio this morning tim harris tim harris is founder in executive director of real change news tim thank you very much for coming and spending time with us this morning happy to be here so start out tell us about real change news sure real changes street newspaper we have a typical month about three hundred fifty homeless and low income people who are making a living selling the paper and the greater seattle area  mission is to provide opportunity and a voice for homeless and low income people while taking action for economic justice and you also have used serve beyond just the paper you also have issues that real change focuses on yeah i mean we're very much an activist organization and most recently we've been focused on on increasing the survival alternatives available to homeless people and and supporting self organize tent cities various survival alternatives that homeless folks here in gauged in creating themselves all right and how much when you are a real change vendor talk about what that brings to a person the way it works is real real simple it's a we think of it as low threshold employment program that parades on a kind of a harm reduction model anybody who wants to sell the paper can come to an orientation and began more or less immediately the orientation takes about an hour at the end of that they get their first ten papers for free and their badge they can go out start selling the paper right away after that the papers cost some thirty five cents each up front and they sell it for the dollar cover price and they keep everything they make and people with tips tend to average about a buck and a quarter that they make on every paper that they sell and you know over the years i've come to see the most important thing about selling the paper is the relationships that get created while people are out there on the street i think that that is incredibly powerful and i've come to see you know each vendor as this sort of little bit of of relationships a lot of people by the time they come to sell the paper  they've you know been through some pretty tough times and they've come to a pretty isolated place and and they've often internalized a lot of the kind of negative messages that people get when they're homeless about not being  and and you know not having a whole lot of value as a person people start to believe that about themselves after a while and what's really cool about the paper is when people are out there sellin the paper that they have dozens if not hundreds of positive interactions with their readers every day and people really get to know them and to care about them and as people are sort of surrounded by this caring community of readers having these these interactions numerous times a day they come to think about themselves differently and take themselves more serious lay and really see themselves as people who have value who who are capable of changing their lives for the better and a lot of times they do and it's really an amazing process to watch i can ever really quite get my head around it another interesting item from your paper that i couldn't quite get my head around is that your circulation is so high that i believe you told me last time you're on the show that you put practically a million dollars a year yeah that's right that's right we do put a million dollars more than a million dollars a year directly into the pockets of the folks who sell the paper or a weekly newspaper and we're selling between eighteen and twenty thousand copies of the paper every we can you know over the course of the year that comes to more than a million bucks all right so let's start here you talked about the ten year plan the king county ten year plan and i know this last year i believe you had at least two different occupy events at westlake and perhaps at city hall as well can you talk about  yeah we've been pretty relentlessly focused on the committee to end homelessness in king county and are organizing and those are the folks that run the ten year plan to end the issue that we have been bringing to them is the dire need for additional emergency shelter and other survival alternatives and seattle since the plan started the first full year of the plan was in two thousand and six and since the plan began the number of homeless folks in shelters alone has increased by seven percent and the number of in king county out on the street after the shelters are full during the official one night count that happens every january has gone up by thirty three percent so you know over that time the increase in the amount of emergency shelter has been quite negligible and the reason for that is that you know according to the policy of the committee to end homelessness providing housing is the answer to homelessness and shelter takes us in the wrong direction so they've drawn this kind of hard line against providing more emergency shelter despite the rising numbers of homeless people who are unserved so over the last year we've been very much in their faces about that asking them to support the safety and survival of homeless people on the street tonight and it's been very encouraging because they've they've clearly heard us and they're they're in the process of a policy shift to support more immediate survival solutions there they have they've they've they're coming to grips with the fact that you know people are becoming homeless more quickly than they are able to provide service enhanced housing alternatives to get people out of homelessness there was this sort of there was this moment during the last governing board meeting that i think wasn't lost on anybody and they were going through their sort of dashboard metrics that they have it to be again of the meeting where they talk about you know the various ways in which their work is is succeeding and how they back it up with with numbers and it seen a people that they're getting into has a in the rate of those people that become homeless again and that sort of thing and the numbers are looking you know fairly encouraging and then they get to this this number which they've just recently started tracking of how many people are newly homeless over the last quarter and that's how many new names have shown up in their data collection system that anybody that goes to a shelter needs to register with how many of those folks have shown up over the last three months and what they had was one hundred seventy five new families who had become homeless in one thousand individuals just over the last three months people who names hadn't been in the system previously so that is an enormous amount of people and you know it became clear to them end and really everybody that people are being dumped onto the street by you know various economic factors that are creating mass homelessness faster than the human services industry can get people out of homelessness and that's a huge issue and you know they've been kind of in denial about it but they're starting to come to grips with it and so do you think they're pursuing no meaningful change to address th i'm trying to be hopeful and trying to be hopeful you know what happened in the last session was they approved some new funding on the city level for shelter for individual homeless women and families and they approved some new funding for day services will have somewhere to go during the day and for some expanded hygiene services it was about five hundred thousand dollars and in additional funding for the services that they approved altogether compared to what's needed that's a teeny drop in the bucket but it  is the first time for you know in my memory since the ten year plan started that they've meaningfully expanded shelter it and they're creating a new policy document right now about how they're going to address this gap and shelter by expanding the emergency survival alternatives and that's going to be released at their next governing board meeting which is one which is january twenty third and we are going to be there of course for keeping the pressure on with the c h k c campaign and what we're doing this time is we're inviting people to come stay one of the tent cities in seattle or on the east side to come and stay at one of those tent cities overnight in solidarity with the folks who are camping out and we're also doing a sort of a material aid campaign where where inviting people to bring things like tents and sleeping bags and and blankets and firewood things that the tent cities need and bring that along with them to organize a sort of you know material a drive so that people can bring that stuff with them stay overnight and in the morning car caravan with us downtown to attend the quarterly governing board meeting of c h k c and you know the reason that we're doing that is we don't think that it's enough to just some play create you know twenty more fifty more even one hundred more emergency shelter beds because you know last year when they did the one night count after the shelters for a fall there were two thousand five hundred ninety four people counted out on the street trying to survive after the shelters were already filled and you know that number probably isn't going to change a whole lot this january when they do a count count again and we're really trying to encourage them to do more to support the sorts of self organize survival alternatives that list folks are organizing themselves the tent cities we think  our model for providing shelter that really goes beyond the simple act of providing emergency shelter and keeping people safe and and helps to build connections between the community and homeless folks is dignity enhancing for the people who are staying there lends itself to the kind of movement building that we need to be engaged with engaged in with homeless people and with the broader community so you know the tent cities are a survival solution that really lend themselves to organizing and movement building and creating the kind of movement for poor people survival and economic justice that we need to turn things around and we think that the city that the committee to end homelessness needs to be much more supportive of these homeless organize survival communities and work with  a sort of a harm reduction model as opposed to merely tolerating their existence which is kind of the status quo right now who makes up the committee and homelessness here locally  is the president of the committee to end homelessness so the governing board is you know it's a decision making body and you know the mayors on it the county executives on it some city council members some mayors from and city council people from from other municipalities in king county so that's that's the leadership council and then the inner agency coun larger there's probably about forty people or forty organizations that are represented in that and it's fairly human services human services have a you know i think the majority of the membership of the committee to end homelessness is supportive of expanding emergency shelter and then it's actually you know kind of a minority a very powerful minority within the committee to end homelessness that has been really kind of holding the line against that and that's changing so and how have they been doing  setting the shelter issue aside how have they been doing on their primary goal of just more affordable homes with services yeah well i mean the theory behind the ten year plan to end homelessness is that if you provide services if you get chronically homeless people in to housing first housing first is the model that posits that if you get somebody who's chronically homeless and to housing with services that it's much more humane and cost effective to do that and gets them on the road to independence then having them on the shelters in the shelters and sort of cycling through emergency rooms and jails and that sort of thing you know it's the idea that housing plus services is cheaper and better for everybody th having people be in homeless shelters and if you target resources to the people who need to services most the chronically homeless people who have been on the street for a long time and often have multiple issues that are there keeping them there that you take a lot of pressure off of the shelter system by pulling the people out who are pulling the most resources and then you're able to to focus those resources on people who are more easily housed and you know over time you  inate homelessness by taking the folks out of the system who are toughest to serve first and creating capacity to to help other people you know it's not a bad theory if it were adequately funded but it's are chronically homeless but the solution was to over ten years create or or maintain eight ows and new units of housing that all new units some of those w preserved to create or preserve eight thousand units of housing with services and they're you know after seven years they're a little better than halfway there and their projections for getting the rest of the way are not particularly encouraging because the funding for new housing has been difficult for a while the pipeline is pretty much frozen and nobody anticipates that that spigot is going to be opening up any time any time soon so they're just simply an able to provide enough housing and services to move people off the streets quickly enough to be able to actually reduce the number of homeless people that are out there the good news is that there are programs out there that are really working like the eighteen eleven eastlake program which you know allows people who are chronically who are chronic alcoholics to be able to get into housing and receive services while they're still drinking and gets them off the street and into a safer environment a of times say they reduce their drinking and sometimes actually stop and and you know it gets them off the streets and out of the shelters and into a more humane situation but you know they opened eighteen eleven eastlake like six years ago and there hasn't been anything like it sense and it serves a pretty limited number of people there needs to be another half dozen of those programs and there needs to be you know much more affordable housing then they're able to provide right now i think the idea that you can solve homelessness through a human services respond alone is incredibly misguided  and that you know if the committee to end homelessness is really serious about ending homelessness that they need to be talking more about what an economic justice to ending homelessness looks like and and what is their strategy for building a movement to to end homelessness they often talk about creating the political will to end homelessness but you know i don't see them really building the movement that it's going to take or harness saying the kind of moral outrage that people justifiably have around around homelessness and and sort of channeling that towards the broad economic justice solutions that we need and what do you see as the major impediment towards them doing that movement is a core group of people you were talking about previously with you know it comes down to institutional self interest i mean the foundations in the united states you know less than one percent of their overall funding goes to supporting organizing and you know there's a reason for that i mean it's not entirely black and white there's exceptions to every every rule but you know the gates foundation isn't particularly interested in deep long term structural change to the economy you know they're about mitigating misery best not structural change seattle foundation united way you know i mean these are not organizations that are known for their radical economic critiques you know so you know that's part of the problem  and you know i think when you have this coalition of big human service providers that are dependent on you know a lot of government and foundation funding they're not going there they're not going to go off the ranch and and you have the big foundations and you have you know government actors like the mayor and the county executive you know the outside the box solutions are not going to come from a group that looks like that you know it's their approach to homelessness is very deep politicized and human services oriented and it's where they've got sort of consensus to operate and you know that's why it's important for folks like us who are outside of that system men and able to take those kinds of political risks and push for that kind of change that's why it's important for us to you know push them in that direction because you know they're only going to go there kicking and screaming spent five minutes left talk about the latest pushback coming from the city of seattle and the different chambers and business interests that are yeah you know that's kind of a mixed bag it started off being really really annoying and it has become more hopeful so the seattle convention center and visitors bureau recently spent about two months now launched this thing called the see it senate campaign and you know it's the latest bid for more quality of life ordinances and  cleaning up the downtown pushing the panhandlers out of sight and that sort of thing and they're talking about how you know undesirable activity on the streets in the downtown is is threatening to or is mean and commerce and it's issue that sort of rears its head cyclical a you know it last time was when tim burgess tried to get through an aggressive panhandling ordinance that we were able to defeat with the mayor's veto and their idea was to take photos of various forms of of you know street disorder and send them to elected since will every day and their narrative was that you know tourism is regaining a fragile foothold in our economy as is threatened by homeless folks and people trying to get people to sign petitions and youth with pitbulls downtown who are all very threatening and scary and keeping people away and it's really interesting because it's very much the sort of manufacturing of a problem you know i mean every municipality has issues with you know things downtown that make people nervous but seattle is actually doing really really well if you look at the internal press of the tourism industry they're projecting that twenty thirteen is going to be probably a record breaking year for tourism based on registrations at washington convention center alone there they're showing th and thirteen is going to be a huge year and travel and leisure magazine does an annual survey of tourists asking them you know to rate various cities the top thirty five cities in that survey seattle comes up is number eleven as safest cities and number eight as cleanest cities so you know this notion they have of street disorder threatening tourism  is not entirely credible and you know i think they're just pushing to get the poor people out of the way so that when all of these tourists come they've got this sort of you know sanitized city that that grandma's going to be entirely comfortable and and really maximizing their profits around that so that part's annoying but but the encouraging thing is that the mayor has convened this center city roundtable that has downtown folks in him and service providers really talking to each other about what the real problems are and how we can work together to solve  and how it's not just as simple as having the police make more arrests or issuing more tickets how these are just very kind of cosmetic solutions that don't do anything long term and how you know if we really want to do something meaningful that looks like more funding for mental health services looks like better treatment options for for drug and alcohol addiction  looks like third places for poor people third spaces for poor people to be downtown when they're not in the shelters or not in their low income housing downtown places for them to to go or an alternative to just kind of hanging out in the street with nothing to do and you know people are really listening to each other and understanding each other and you know it looks like there is some amount for real solutions to these issues that are long term and actually going to be helpful instead of making things worse all right well with that we are just about out of time we're talking with tim harris he is founder and executive dirt director of real change news and how can people find real change news we are thrilled change news org or  at a street corner near you all right well i want to thank you very much for coming in and spending time with us this morning my pleasure we are very lucky to have with us live in the studios this morning jim gettler jim gettler is a nonprofit consultant community organizer and national political activist for more than twenty years he has been advising a wide variety of nonprofit organizations ranging from local arts organizations to major music and arts festivals to long term care facilities to political campaigns he is a former board member for several nonprofits including seattle events the washington state alternative artisans guild reclaim the media and the northwest community partnership as well as being a past president of the board of the seattle folklore society and he's the author of two books on the topic of nonprofits and has recently been working with a number of non profits interested in applying for a low power f m license in the recently announced opening scheduled  several groups on a low power f m talk about low power f m well low power f m is probably the most exciting thing i've seen come down the pike and a long long time i don't know where to start in talking about it so i guess i'll start maybe d hear that that fuzzy sound between the stations and so on that's what we used to call analog and a whole long reason for i'm not going to get into technical weeds on it because the more i talk technical the less that rely i realize i know basically we had a time when channels had to be separated there had to be ninety in the ninety point three and ninety point six point eight and so on because you had the separation or the channels were quite literally bleed together and where you thought you were listening to one station all of a sudden would bleed out and you get another station things were very precise and then in the mid in the mid late ninety's one nine hundred ninety s the digital age came about and suddenly you could tune into a radio frequency and be exactly where you wanted to be so it was eighty eight one change the rules for f m and all stations are licensed by you have to get a license from the federal communications commission to operate a legal f m or am radio station the station for instance is licensed i think to the university if i'm not correct university washee university washington owns the license they don't own the air they don't own the air space they own the frequency the frequencies are determined by people they sit around a room they determine you know how this is going to work so this frequency is owned by the university of washington and it is managed by the university of washington so what happened is around two thousand they realized that we could change these frequencies a little bit and we could allow more people into the you know the playground basically more people would be allowed to participate in have radio stations it would be limited to the big boys those with you know the n p r stations that you know ninety thousand or one hundred fifty thousand watts that we could open up this field a little bit that around two really saying was it was going to jeopardize their membership base in prior advertisers and a lot of money was on the table and they circulated a cd to all the members of congress that showed how terrible the interference would be if a low power station was allowed to operate anywhere near a full power station now the reality is it was nonsense it was total complete jibberish but members of congress being members of congress have a million things on their plate the national association of broadcasters delivers you a cd and says listen to this this is terrible they voted down the changes in the law that allowed low power f m to happen in two thousand and one for thereabouts i remember going to work in a station that time and we were hoping that the law was going to change and it didn't change so in the interim years between two thousand and one or two thousand and one or two and now it was two thousand and thirteen a lot of people around the country i mean thousands of people around the country testified before hearings that were held by the in various cities almost every major city had a hearing where the f c c commissioners came and they were really cool and they listen to the people in the community and the community bay had been made up of artists it was up political organizers it was church people it was gardeners it was it was really nice because it was everybody it wasn't the stereotypical organizer you know with the you know the black jack in a briefcase what happened then was in about two years ago the congress came to its senses and realized wait a minute these low power people aren't going to be the end of the world it might just work that we could actually open up the bands of f m and allow the community stations an opportunity the community of around that opportunity to have radio stations then in this look at this well for two years that to revise the rules blah blah blah they had to rewrite the way that licenses would be distributed to low power stations community groups they decided that they would limit it to nonprofit organizations or to government entities non profit no ads they would limit the frequencies to one hundred watts i'll get to that in a minute why that's not why the both a good thing and a bad thing and that they would have all the rules of the same rules that apply to a full power station in the seven words you can't say on the radio all those rules apply you keep a log i mean everything is identical except the power is much less then on november thirtieth two thousand and thirteen that and thirty for those paying close attention twenty twelve twenty twenty twenty twelve this year the f c c issued the rules and the rules basically are good you won't hear me say that a federal has issued good rules very often but i'm saying it now so write it down what they said is that we first of all that the that the channels that we more channels available in techno jargon it means second channel is now available which means that between eighty point one and eighty point three three point four you have two and three so instead of having to jump four channels you can jump two channels because again member i said we have digital which means if you turn an eighty point two it means are going to eight point two so what's called second channel separation that's a really good thing that means in a major metropolitan area even like seattle there may be as many as nine new frequencies available that's a big deal if you live in a rural area or a small town you may have a dozen or two frequencies available to you that's a really big deal if you live in a small town if you live in an area with many farm workers for instance folks who move through if you have an area that just is under served by the big radio stations this is a tremendous development the second thing they've allowed is they've allowed it's called a translator or repeater and that means your hundred watts suddenly doubles which is really great which means that a five mile area or a ten mile area you might have as much as a twenty mile area your signal is going to tech is going to carry that means you can cover a whole city think about it so you have a dozen new stations in metropolitan areas this suddenly becomes real the third thing which is i like as a community organizer is that they are giving they they they score the applications and i get to that  competing interests involved they want to see that they want to see you can work together that you can monitor your own playground that the f c c is have to come in and say what we have you know for applications what are we going to do how are you going to force you to share or have they come in and saying we will share before we talk to you so that's a really good thing as well so we got three things out of the deal it's pretty cool i think the possibilities are amazing and so that in a nutshell is low power f m i should say that once we have the gear for a low  sitting in a studio right now the microphones and sort of computers i don't what they do and boxes electronic stuff once you have the gear to transmit by low power f m you also have the very same gear to transmit or to broadcast on the web so you certainly have complete ability to take back your media you then have radio and web which means podcasting or streaming available to you using the same gear and it means you can finally take your message to the folks that's pretty cool how's that for a short answer so what in addition to a nonprofit then what other hurdles are there you talked about document equipment yes well the first thing is is to get if you don't have a nonprofit and i want to get down to what i do a lot of if you are a nonprofit organization you're what you've got one step in that one foot in the door if you can work with two or three nonprofit organizations you certainly open the door completely and you can then obtain the felt the application the application is very complex it's not just who you are where you live it gets that the technical details of where you would locate the transmitter so as to not have any interference from other stations this that the biggest hurdle some groups will find is that they're not a nonprofit well that's ok we can work around that you can be umbrella by another arts or by other organization in other words if you do art and your group makes art or you do music and you're not anything but a bunch of people who do music if you can locate a nonprofit who is also doing music or doing art and they will do what's called umbrella you and it's perfectly legal there by laws would have to say they can umbrella other organizations you can then have legal arrange with that organization to basically do the work for them or on their behalf that may be a complicated way of saying it but it's umbrella thing your project under an existing nonprofit that is a really great way to go on many levels requires some legal documents between yourself and the sponsor but once you have that you would be a self regulating self operating organization under the auspices of an existing nonprofit and therefore can apply straight up i'm suggesting that small radio stations especially in small towns partner with the public safety and to the cops the fire folks they probably not going to want a program where they might but the point is when they need to talk to the people directly that's a way to do it if there's icy roads you know there's a bad car wreck on you know state highway one fifty four the easiest most direct way to reach people is through that radio when they flip it on the morning with their morning coffee so that's one way to partner a partnership which makes a lot of sense and will be viewed very favorably when the review comes up by the f c c with you when your application goes in with all the others so the partnering i cannot stress strongly enough the need to partner with other organizations that you may be working with or know about  in my perfect world of course i'd see you know cities having arts collaboration is a dozen arts organizations joining together to make one application likewise a dozen public interest political the political  junkies getting together and agreeing to work together not on their own operations but for the purpose of obtaining a low power application or by filling out the party applications would be a very strong application regardless of where you are now i know this is we're streaming we're streaming out on the inner website believe so wherever you are in the country this applies whatever city you're in if there are what i doesn't festivals or arts organizations that might want to work together pull your resources it need not be expensive when the first questions when the first two or three questions are going to cost what's going to cost you can cost almost nothing you can you can get a lot of the equipment on the scrounge there is no application fee for a  license when if you get an f m license a full power i think they're auctioned off or something and these are you hear stories of college radio stations being sold for millions of dollars well that doesn't apply here ok there is no application fee not the fee ok the application is going to be open in october for ten days from october fifteenth through ten days twenty fifth october next year not tobar of two thousand and thirteen i'm sorry so that's that's the that the time window i wasn't specific make shows with us the timeline this is going to affect money to say you know is it between now and october fifteenth you're not going to have a whole lot of expenses you're going to have to buy a lot of coffee for a bunch of community meetings you have to run a church basement somewhere so you can have a room in october fifteenth october of two thousand and thirteen the application window opens up and that's when you send the thing i think inside it electronically x number of months after that i'm going to the say six months after that would be april of two thousand and fourteen will probably announce who did and did not receive the frequencies in october two thousand and fifteen or eighteen months after the announcement of application of a successful applicants you need to be on the air so if they give you eighteen months after they say you got your license to go on the air that's three years from now if you can't raise a couple thousand bucks to buy yourself a transmitter in three years you know something's wrong so one thing is that the window is easy norma's the length of time is wonderful i compared to having a baby you know you have plenty of time you freak out and then you realize oh wait we've got plenty of time to figure this out before the next thing comes up and we got to freak out and figure that one out same exact idea so the money you know is for internet next is next to nothing you can get you know free software i just gave away to laptops off recycle i mean computers are not expensive anymore the gear i'm telling folks to have about ten thousand dollars give or take and that's not a scrounge that's getting things on the scrounge that's you know finding carpenters to build fancy tables and so on and then getting gear that is good quality i know budget ten thousand dollars  that the antenna is kids kind of cool actually the rules for low power f m are that the intent has to be one hundred feet above grade above the ground so i don't think rocket scientist to figure out why you want t high point count if you can get it at one hundred feet the translator or the repeater for the seconds the secondary signal it will go out is also hundred feet so these are not intrusive and ten is by any stretch you can put very site specific and it's going to you know it's going to depend upon exactly where you are working organization in oregon where it's a big field or it's a festival but it's a you know a big open space not a problem if you're in a congested urban area may be a problem  so i say if you know figure it out there's always a way through the maze so the trick is to figure it out and figure out how to place that antenna in the repeater antenna you because that wasn't available before her and that was a huge thing that was added to the rules when we saw them in november thirtieth was the ability the ability for each elop e f m applicant to have one repeater that is great what it is it's all the unused frequencies are if you drive down the freeway you keep that signal all the way for one hundred miles well low power f m is not going to have that kind of juice but it will be able to boost that signal beyond the initial ten or so miles from the your engineer do that there are engineers available you can and me i cokie up with some folks who are very much part of our community it's not expensive proposition we're talking one hundred two dollars for an engineer to do that to do the analysis to figure out dig around on the google a little bit but in seattle i got this email about a week or two ago there's going to a community meeting about low power it's called the low power community radio opportunity and it's being hosted by brown paper tickets which means langston hughes performing arts center one zero four seventeenth ave south in seattle the event is produced by brown paper tickets in partnership with the seattle office of arts and cultural affairs and for culture will cover what this opportunity means for local nonprofits interested in learning more about the last wave of hyper low power community radio signals oh by the way will be our last frequency opening in our lifetime so step up topics will include what's possible with not only radio signal but a studio with the potential to be a multi platform community media hub which is why i just said earlier but they say much better than i do basically once you have the gear you can seriously rock n roll and your community suddenly has a voice and that in itself is pretty darn cool previously who has garnered the largest share of low power f m licenses funny you should ask the i think is that ninety percent ninety two percent my kid says all statistics are almost eighty seven percent of all statistics are made up on the spot but this one holds true ninety two percent of all low power f m stations are own by fundamentalist christian churches now i have got nothing against a fundamentalist christian church i could care less however i do have a problem with folks hogging up the dial with basically the same message so they will be applying in mass i assure you they will not be having long winded debates about the merits of low power f m vs internet or not to be arguing over what it costs and do we have a thousand bucks for this they're going to get the applications filled out and they're going to get the senate i suppose the perfect world commuter organizations would partner with the churches i see that happening sometimes but that's who basically applies and they are called for lack of a better term transmitters in a closet they don't have a studio you don't there's nothing but if you do have a stooges i should say this community groups that have studios get an extra point which is part of the new rules as you get extra points on in the point the point scale if you if you have a studio open twenty hours a week so if your commute your studio for instance is in a community center or your studio is in a public space of some sort and it's really part of the community i mean it's actually got coffee cups and it's got you know frayed curtains and it's you know the real thing you get extra points the idea of that is to encourage community groups to do this not to say that transmitters in a closet run by the fundamentalist churches cannot do it but saying to community groups hey you wanted this you came out by the thousands in cities around the country saying you wanted this you told us how you wanted it now do it boxes that are just well you know there's sort of that they're out there automated their automated automated transmitters that you know just take this is the programming developed by you know some dude's outfit in southern texas city beeps around the country so it all they're doing is they're rebroadcasting a can signal and that's why by prop is if it's a real church doing real community programming far out i mean go for it i mean do it bring the kids in make a make them to make media teach them to run that board because that's a skill i mean there's a lot of things downstream that are good about working in a studio who just taking canned content and spitting out again a problem so that's the idea the point system is to encourage people to have a real studio with real human beings you know and real coffee cups because that's real that's that that says you are really part of the community and and you know doing doing your thing and since you've been working with groups on this over the years  what in terms of content do people need to focus your good point you can do almost anything you want i mean be honest with you i made jokes about having radio shows about car repair i mean really local local local one thing i should say is that when you first stations in organisations thinking about going low power f m as well as going internet streaming member using the same gear i move my hands around the radio it doesn't do us a lot of good once you have the gear you can broadcast and stream once you stream though a whole new set of rules come into play involving copyright how not to get into too deep but basically those who own the copyrights at the mega level you know the major studios have bought themselves a law that requires high royalties for things broadcast on the radio or on streaming the way around that is to limit your programming or to not limit it to photo encourage programming that is in fact local anybody can go anywhere to listen to pop top forty i mean there's no shortage of listening to your favorite band on the radio stations there might be a shortage of hearing local songwriters or hearing local poets or hearing drums or hearing the songs of your community that have never been copyrighted and have never been recorded percent that gets around all of those rather honoris copyright rules but force it also forces you to think in terms your own community talk your shopkeepers talk to that the busker is a street musicians down the way that in a roundabout way encourages community radio by saying ok you don't have to pay those fees but adjust your programming so that you don't have to pay those fees gone are the days of the pirate we're going to play this stuff and no one's going to know the difference because too many people to be watching this as time moves on now right now my guess is many people of her are hearing about this for the very first time it's not going to make it into the corporate news and n p r are not going to run positive stories about low power f m because they're terrified that we're going to take away their subscriber base so you  i mean they've had thirty years to develop their community and they haven't done it they got in bed with archer daniel and they got in bed with the gates foundation and that's where they are they're happy but that's not community now the communities can actually make their own content they are going to a little nervous so don't expect to be running positive stories about how to do this list low power f m thing they don't have to worry about the royalty fees because they make it so much money because they're sponsored that it's not even an issue to write a check if you're a community group you need to be aware of it this is one reason i'm suggesting the arts organizations work together too because between them all they will have artists and they will have performers and artisans and speakers and talkers and and just folks who can make wonderful programming learn how to do the interview how to learn how to you know mix a program together that makes sense and bypass all those rules that mainly apply to larger stations but the content you can do you want i mean you know you can say you know play music i mean whatever you hear in your community is perfect radio at this level it's absolutely perfect if you want to talk to shopkeepers do that i mike i say my job is always a car repair you know this is how to change a tire i might be the most boring thing in the world to some people unless you need to know how to change a tire and then suddenly this is the coolest thing you ever heard coming over the radio or with a couple of tribes there getting into the storytelling side tribes with a long oral tradition get stations they've got between now which is where we know first the year until now until mid october to get it together so that's a long time and as i say the first you got to do is fill out applications and send it in and you got another eighteen months or two years after that to actually get it together so this is the time to plant get that thing get that application to get you get the application on the f c c website i want to give the prettiest thing before i leave here we've got about a minute left oh my god ok quick a qui u s radio permit the s radio dot org good people doing good work they got channel finders on her site they got a lot of how to help their nasty focused get ahold of me get ahold me through the radio station here is easiest way to do it  all right so like you said this is the most exciting thing you've seen in ever not last there every he's like yeah tell this is i've been playing the media this is the coolest thing to come down the pike alright well with that we are and for