Local 107.3FM, UNB Saint John’s campus and community radio station, has recently been awarded $50,000 that will be used to hire both a Volunteer and a Women’s Collective Coordinator.
This grant has been made available by the Community Radio Fund of Canada, and has been awarded to Local 107.3 FM for a total of $164,378 since 2010, for improving local radio programming, volunteer training, and community participation.
With the addition of this grant, Local 107.3FM is hoping to increase current recruitment efforts from underrepresented areas of the community as well as increasing the support offered current volunteers.
Brian Cleveland, station manager, hopes that the Volunteer and Women’s Collective Coordinators will only help to continue to diversify the station as representative of the community.
“Usually at least half of our volunteers are students, and that’s certainly one of our main focuses, but on top of that, our goal is to bring students out into the community here, so a lot of our volunteers end up being graduates and alumni, from just anywhere and anywhere”, says Cleveland.
“[Local FM] really represents a spectrum of Saint John, from young teenagers who come through co-op programs in high school up to people who’ve been here since its inception in the seventies […] the programming itself ends up being a little bit of everything”.
There is also another reason for the station to celebrate. This is Local FM’s 15th year on the air as an FM station and a focus of the volunteer coordinator will be some kind of event to mark the occasion.
“The station itself has existed in some form since 1972,” stated Cleveland, explaining that at one time it was just another club on campus.
Local FM is also looking for new volunteers,“it’s definitely a really interesting opportunity to do something very different”, says Cleveland.
“People can definitely come here and get work experience. We get an interesting, different mix where it’s not necessarily someone’s schooling path so it’s really driven out of [their] self-interest”.
The focus for Local 107.3FM has been diversity: in staff, volunteers, and content. With the big anniversary and grant, there seems to be a lot going on at our campus community radio station already, only three months into 2016.
