She is also a program director with Brooklyn based VibeGirls Radio and  producer with the national Criminal Justice Dialogue Project Thousand Kites. I asked her five questions about her work at Thousand Kites, and any advice she has for people starting community radio projects.
 

What drew you to your work at Thousand Kites? 

I first heard about Thousand Kites when I was volunteering with Book 'Em, a project based out of Pittsburgh. Book 'Em sends books and educational materials to people incarcerated across the country who have little access to books. Prison libraries severely lack resources and ordinary people are not allowed into the prisons, only book publishers and bookstores. So at Book 'Em we had started receiving letters from Red Onion State Prison, a maximum security facility in Pound, Virginia and in many of the letters prisoners were reporting abuses and human rights violations in the facility.

It turned out that this prison was one of the facilities where prisoners could listen to Calls from Home, the radio program that is a part of Thousand Kites, which broadcasts on Appalshop’s radio station. So folks from Pittsburgh started calling into Calls from Home, sending messages to the people who had been writing letters. Working across state lines, community activists, prisoners’ families and the Calls for Home radio community began a public campaign to address human rights abuses in the prison, which resulted in direct change to that state’s policies regarding restraining prisoners, the use of guns, and long-term isolation of prisoners.  As a radio activist, seeing such a clear example of how a radio program could be a powerful organizing tool inspired me and led me to want to get more involved in Thousand Kites. 

What has been a memorable moment in your work on Calls From Home so far?

I think every week it is memorable for me to listen to the stories of families who call in.  There is one young girl that calls in every week and sends a message for her father. One week she’ll recount a story of how she celebrated her birthday and the next week a sweet personal story about catching a cold, and then the following week about getting better, all juxtaposed with her singing songs dedicated to her dad. Her messages have given me insight into life with your father locked away, far from home, with a phone call and radio as your only means of communication.

How has Calls From Home made a difference in your community?

There are too many ways to recount how Thousand Kites has made an enormous difference in the community, so I'll just talk about a few.  On a very basic human level Thousand Kites through the Calls from Home radio show connects prisoners and their loved ones who may have no other way to communicate if it wasn't for the program. Phone calls are prohibitively expensive, as are prison visits, as the facilities are nestled away in the mountains in Appalachia, over eight hours away from the majority of the communities where people come from. Therefore, the radio show is a kind of life line with kids singing songs to their dads, wives reciting love poems and friends sending messages of hope and support.

Also, Calls from From Home has helped break down the barrier between the rural communities that surround the prisons where many of the prison workers come from and those incarcerated in the eleven state, federal and private prisons in the area.  When people hear these family members calling the station, it chips away at their perception that all the prisoners are violent and allows them to realize that they too are real people, with families who care about them.  It presents the criminal justice issue as the complex multi-dimensional issue that it really is.

What would be your advice for someone who wants to start a community radio project?

I think it's crucial to think how you will engage your listeners and go beyond being just a community radio project, to being a participatory radio project.  The power of media to democractize our communities is in it being interactive.  This is what has made Calls From Home so successful as a truly participatory show driven by many of the listeners who are the family members calling in. They also build community outside of the radio program, by announcing meetings and events that then allows radio listeners to get together and organize grassroots campaigns.

There is a great example of participatory radio from Thousand Kites early days when prisoners and Thousand Kites radio hosts played chess together.  Each week the radio DJ's would announce a move and then the prisoners would get together to decide on a move and send a postcard in with it. I'll bet you can guess which side always won the game.

Participatory radio can also be something as simple as setting up speakers on the street, connecting them to a radio tuned to your frequency and giving out free snacks and radio promotional materials like stickers, magnets and keychains. Each community is different and it's up to you to figure out what works for yours, but I highly encourage you to go beyond just being another talking pundit behind a microphone, even if your views are different than what's normally heard on the air.

What are some projects that you're working on now that really excite you?

We are starting to partner with community groups across the country so that they can produce their own version of Calls from Home in their own way. With 2.5 million people locked behind bars in the United States, we are talking about an entire nation of people who are cut off from their family members and society.  Groups in New Mexico, Upstate New York, Pittsburgh and even Canada are starting to use our interactive model with basic internet phone technology like Skype, free audio editing software and the best simple technology around FM radio.  We are working on creating a toolbox and tutorials so that the model will be even easier to replicate.  We have a great video explaining the project which you can view here.

With the passage of the Local Community Radio Act communities across the country will be able to start their own low power FM radio stations which will make it easier to access the airwaves and start their own Calls from Home like project in their area. 

Visit www.callsfromhome.org to listen to our work and to get involved with our national outreach for our syndicated program.

by Rachel Allen

Reprinted from NAMAC