SUPPORT KPFK COMMUNITY RADIO during its Fall member drive Oct 3-31
by Michael Novick, interim General Manager
Listener-sponsored free speech Pacifica community radio for Southern California is running an on-air membership and funding drive in October. The station has cut its expenses dramatically, eliminating almost all paid management, and with the quasi-retirement of Margaret Prescod and the death of Roy of Hollywood, no longer has any paid programmers. But the station has failed to cover all its operating expenses in over five years, since before the pandemic, and it and the parent Pacifica Foundation have run up debts to the point the national board is seeking to sell the building that houses KPFK and the Pacifica Radio Archives.
The only way to avoid that is to double the current membership of the station. If each existing member recruited one more to become a dues-paying member, preferably as a monthly sustainer or subscriber, that would do it. Or if all of the 19,000 subscribers to the station’s free e-newsletter became a member, that would more than triple the current membership.
There are changes in the offing at the station, as management in consultation with staff, governance and the listeners seeks to refresh the programming and meet community needs. These include moving the Spanish language newscast to the early morning, returning Democracy Now! to 8 AM, bringing back Access Unlimited, the disability rights program, creating an environmentally-focused strip, and changing some of the evening drive time programming, such as moving “Working Voices,” the station’s labor-focused show into that block, along with various other measures to improve the flow, along with giving the board operators more responsibility to act as the living, personable faces of the station, curating the audio content for listeners.
Volunteers and influencers are also needed to do social media promotion and marketing of the programming content or to work on a website redesign to make it more user friendly, newsy and resource-rich. If you can help, contact me at gm@kpfk.org; also if you can host a house party or luncheon to raise funds for the station. And if you can donate yourself, especially substantial sums, please do so here: https://kpfk.wedid.it/
