There must be 50 ways: Participating in democracy #45: Community radio

According to MyTuner.com[1] there are some 285 community radio stations in the US. As one community radio station in Wisconsin explains it[2]: 

"In 1946, a group of conscientious objectors formed The Pacifica Foundation, a media organization with the goal to build a nationwide network of non-commercial radio stations. They formed the first ‘listener-sponsored’ radio station in the United States, KPFA – Berkeley, in 1949."

Volunteers are trained in by professional employees and can host programs with themes that are in some way serving the public good, whether by political discussion or specialized cultural content or any number of other educational topical programs. 

For several years in the 1980s, I was a professional community organizer with two others in a small organization, Waging Peace, based in Hayward, Wisconsin. We hosted a three-hour peace and justice program on a nearby tribal station, WOJB (Wisconsin OJiBwe), on the Lac Court Oreilles Anishinaabe reservation. We interviewed a wide range of peace and justice activists, either in the station or via telephone (this was pre-Internet, pre-Zoom). The lead producer for the station, who was a paid professional who did pieces for other tribal stations and occasional pieces for NPR, trained us to run a simple radio program. All three of us were volunteers, as were many other hosts at the station. 

We were certainly participating in democracy when we broadcast interviews of a Green party candidate fresh back from Germany, who helped our listeners understand the Euromissile crisis in Germany that was driven by then-president Ronald Reagan's decision to deploy US nuclear weapons with a destabilizing first-strike capacity to US bases in Germany. 

Similarly, we promoted a far deeper understanding of the treaty rights of all the 14 bands of the Lake Superior Ojibwe by interviewing experts from the Great Lakes Indian Fish and Wildlife Commission.

We sat with a Christian minister just back from apartheid South Africa to educate us and our listeners about conditions there, even as pressure was building in the US to boycott South Africa. 

In short, we helped broadcast many peace and justice programs to our listeners, virtually all of those programs educating our fellow citizens in matters under consideration in our local, state, and national democracy. 

This is what happens at those 285 stations around the US, and this is a robust element of our citizen-based democracy.

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[1] https://mytuner-radio.com/radio/country/united-states/genre/community-stations

[2] https://www.wdrt.org/community-radio/