Tractor Tavern to Match 10k in Listener Donations to KBCS

Thanks to Tractor Tavern in Ballard, every donation made to KBCS between 12-7pm on Friday, September 17th, will be matched dollar for dollar, up to 10k! Help KBCS get a strong start to its Fall Fund Drive by joining us on the 17th with your contribution, or make your donation early (Donate Here)!

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Juan Hood – Westlake Station

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General Manager Updates September 2021

Managing a nonprofit college radio station can be an equally rewarding and challenging experience. From my first experience as a young “hair-on-fire” college student reporter in the mid 1970’s to my longtime experience as a station manager, I have weathered my share of campus intrigues, the existential threats posed by protracted economic downturns, and the occasional short-sighted temptation by some college administrators of selling off the campus radio station for a quick infusion of cash.

But the rewards associated with my work in college public radio are among my most cherished memories. Chief among those memories is my work as a trusted mentor and instructor to many talented and gifted students over the years who have gone on to pursue a rewarding career in broadcasting.  

In addition to our educational role as a college radio station, KBCS embraces a community radio format and has been a part of the fabric of our lives in the Pacific Northwest for nearly fifty years. At KBCS we provide an increasingly rare opportunity for everyday people who live in our community to share their passion for music and life with their friends and neighbors across the region.

Community radio stations are very democratic institutions that embrace the rich diversity of the communities we serve and amplify the regions distinctive joie de vivre while promoting our unique cultural heritage.

KBCS is a self-supporting division of Bellevue College. That means we are responsible for raising the funds that are necessary to operate the station. The college provides substantial “in-kind” support such as facilities, maintenance, and administrative support but it is up to us to raise around $1,200,000.00 a year to pay the bills.

We do that by asking our listeners to support us with regular financial donations. Last year we raised over $800,000.00 dollars from individual listener support alone. Some KBCS listeners can afford to contribute more than other listeners, but no donation is too small or too large. Together, they all add up to provide the largest and most important source of funding for KBCS.

Our annual on-air fall fundraising campaign will begin September 17^th. You can help us get off to a good start by donating to KBCS today. Please consider becoming a sustaining donor to KBCS by donating a set amount each month charged to your credit card or paid through your bank account. Sustaining donors are critical to our success and provide for a more consistent and reliable source of funding for KBCS. A regular monthly donation to KBCS of just $10, $20, $35 or more will help ensure that KBCS can continue this great community radio tradition in the Pacific Northwest for another fifty years.

Thank you for your continued moral and financial support of true community radio here in our beautiful little corner of the world.

Dana Lee Buckingham

KBCS General Manager and Proud Sustaining Contributor to Community Radio KBCS.

Racialized Trauma

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Black Coffee Northwest

Empowerment and racial pride are paramount for the Black community. Despite centuries of oppression, many African Americans strive to start and maintain their own businesses to create personal and generational wealth. Black businesses such as barbershops and eateries, along with churches, have historically been safe social harbors for community members.

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Executive Director Beth Takekawa Retires From Wing Luke Museum

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Not Yo’ Butterfly – Nobuko Miyamoto

Nobuko Miyamoto is an activist, music and dance artist, who found her political and artistic voice in the Asian American movement. As a child, she and her parents were incarcerated in the internment camps.  Later, she performed on Broadway and has since produced many creative works. Over the past few decades, Miyamoto has been facilitating workshops to encourage her community to tell their personal stories.  Listen to Miyamoto’s reflection of the past year and the importance of expressing your story. (more…)

Advocating Against Domestic Violence

When Mariners fan, Mike Clark heard about a 5k fundraiser that winds through each level at T-Mobiile Park and ends with a lap on the ball field, he signed up.  The fundraiser was for the Washington State Coalition Against Domestic Violence (WSCADV).  Ten years later, he’s still  a staunch advocate against domestic violence.

The Refuse to Abuse 5K is Saturday, July 17th starting 8:30 am.

KBCS General Manager: Important Updates

Dear Friends, Volunteers, and Supporters of KBCS,

I want to begin this important update by thanking all our active KBCS volunteer hosts and producers for your dedication, ingenuity, and creativity as we continue the final countdown to the end of the 20/21 fiscal year on June 30. I think we can all agree that this past year has been quite a challenge in many ways. The continuous improvements in the quality of the remote programs you are producing for KBCS is amazing. This letter is lengthy, but it contains important information for all KBCS volunteers so please take the time to read through this.
June is the last month of our fiscal year and is the busiest time of the work year for me even during normal times. Although this year has been everything but normal, there is still a great deal of work going on at KBCS as we close the books on this fiscal year while finalizing an equally ambitious budget for the upcoming fiscal year.

After being placed on financial probation by the college at the beginning of this fiscal year, we have collectively risen to the challenge of becoming an entirely self-supporting service of the college despite the pandemic shutdown and the loss of most all our underwriting revenue.

Notwithstanding the subsequent economic, political, and social fallout the pandemic shutdown created, this has been a remarkable year of fundraising for KBCS. The good news is that we expect to end this fiscal year solidly in the black and with a carryover surplus for the first time in many years. I am pleased to report that we are on track to reach our ambitious fundraising goal of generating $1.2 million dollars in total revenue over this past fiscal year. In addition to the generous financial support raised from our supporters and listeners, we received a substantial donation of $50,000.00 from an enthusiastic friend of KBCS that was deposited in a new investment fund for KBCS at the Bellevue College Foundation.

Over the past seven years of running consistently large budget deficits, the station was forced to defer investing in important capital improvement projects. That deferred maintenance in replacing and upgrading mission critical equipment finally reached the point where parts and service updates were simply no longer available. Our overall broadcast quality was negatively impacted by this outdated and poorly performing equipment. This only added to the other challenges that we were faced with over the past year.

Thanks to an emergency pandemic recovery grant provided to KBCS through the Biden Administration’s American Recovery Act, we have purchased two new high-tech Wheatstone console mixer boards; one for the KBCS on-air studio, and the other for the production studio in House 5. We expect these new boards to be delivered by the end of July. We are also making a significant capital improvement investment in both hardware and software upgrades of our station automation system and the replacement of other outdated broadcasting equipment.

Once completed, these capital improvement projects will greatly increase our operating efficiencies, improve the overall quality and consistency of both our on-air broadcast and online streaming outputs, and offer enhanced remote broadcasting capabilities.

During the past fiscal year, we have added an additional programming stream on our HD2 radio subchannel called World News Radio KBCS. This all-news and fine arts broadcast stream is programmed to appeal to an entirely different audience demographic than our traditional community radio format on KBCS FM. This HD2 channel is totally automated and features a 24-hour live satellite feed from the world-renowned BBC World Service in London as the programming base.

When you factor in the new satellite receivers and upgrades, and the digital transmitter that we installed last year, the major capital improvements that we have made over just the past year and a half at KBCS amounts to over $300,000.00. As a result of these important capital improvements, we have already increased the quality and efficiency of our broadcast outputs and are now reaching a larger potential audience with a much more consistently reliable signal. Most gratifying is that listeners are reporting that we are now heard more clearly throughout the greater Tacoma area. That is why we are now proudly adding Tacoma to our top of the hour legal ID.

It is important to note that funding for these capital improvement projects came from public and private grants and not from listener donations or from funding from the college. Our listener donations support our local programming and fixed operating expenses.

On another subject of interest to most of you, Bellevue College’s interim President, former Governor Gary Locke, has recently released a timeline for a return to a “new normalcy” for the Bellevue College campus. I have been waiting for this official announcement before updating you as to our re-entry plans at KBCS.

The colleges return-to-work plan calls for a gradual phase-in beginning this September through the end of December. Full normal operations are expected to begin with the Winter Quarter of 2022. Until then, the access restrictions currently in place on campus are still in effect.

I know many of you are anxious to return to the studios here on campus to produce your shows and access new music from our music library. However, access to the KBCS studios will remain limited and a controlled process of reopening the studios to volunteers and the public will take place in incremental phases over time.

For several weeks now, I have been working with Iaan and Gregory on a formal reopening plan for access to the KBCS facilities. What I can tell you now is that many of these details are still being worked out and our plan must be flexible and comply with all state and Bellevue College regulations. At this time, these re-entry plans still include social distancing requirements, the wearing of face masks, and no more than four people at any one time will be allowed access to House 5. All volunteers, students, and staff will be required to schedule their visits to the KBCS studios with station management in advance and you must complete a health survey form that is available online through a link on the Bellevue College homepage before entering campus. This online form must be completed every time you intend to visit campus for any reason.

For the immediate future, I expect no substantial changes in the restricted access currently in place. The logistics involved in the return to hosting live music programs at KBCS outside of our regular business hours is still under review. This precaution is necessary for both health and security reasons. Security issues at college and public radio stations have become even more important during this time of heightened political polarization and increased random acts of violence taking place across the country. We are taking necessary and proactive precautions to increase station security for the safety and wellbeing of everyone.

Please keep an eye out for further updates concerning station access as the evolving situation may warrant. Iaan and Gregory will soon be releasing additional information on a new volunteer music host onboarding procedure. Our news volunteers and student news interns will receive updates related to station access directly from Yuko.

All KBCS music hosts on either the current “active” or “non-active” volunteer lists will be required to complete several forms so that you can be officially registered as a college volunteer and issued a Bellevue College email address. This Bellevue College email address will be necessary for your access to important communications, online and cloud-based program access, mandatory training procedures, and new remote broadcasting processes.

And finally, you will also notice that we are making changes to keep our programming fresh and provide more opportunities for new volunteers as we seek to further diversify our entertainment programming offerings. We are actively seeking new volunteer hosts with original programming concepts to replace current volunteers that have retired or decided to move on. We will have more about that later. As students return to the Bellevue College campus, we intend to provide more on-air opportunities for them in both our news and music programming.

These programming changes are necessary so that the programming on KBCS remains representative of the larger and more diverse coverage area that we serve. That is what college community radio is all about. Providing a broadcast opportunity for people from all walks of life to share their passion for music, news, and life with their friends and neighbors is the core mission of community radio. Providing real world experience and enhanced professional training for our students is a core component of our academic mission.

Finally, if you have not already done so, please plan to get your COVID vaccination shot(s) as soon as possible. The more people that are vaccinated, the sooner a more normal version of life can resume for all of us. Here is a link to current information where you can get your free vaccination shot here in King County. Click on the hyperlink below or copy and paste this address into your browser:

https://kingcounty.gov/depts/health/covid-19/vaccine/distribution

In closing, thank you again for all you do for KBCS and in keeping the dream of true community radio alive here in the Greater Seattle metropolitan area. Please feel free to email your questions to me at dana.buckingham@bellevuecollege.edu and I will try to answer as many of them as I can.

As I said in a closing letter when we began this difficult fiscal year, “we can do this…”

Sometimes all it takes is having faith in ourselves and our companions as well as a determination to meet the difficult challenges we face through a more creative approach to problem solving, a positive mental attitude, and a true passion for something that is important in our lives and in the lives of others.

Dana Lee Buckingham

KBCS General Manager and Proud Sustaining Contributor to Community Radio KBCS.

Juneteenth

After much discussion, Congress passed legislation to establish Juneteenth as a national holiday.  President Joe Biden signed the bill on June 17, 2021.

This series features perspectives on Juneteenth.  It covers some details behind the historical event on June 19, 1865.  You’ll also listen to local people speak on what Juneteenth means to them.

1.  Kwami Abdul- Bey is a Co-convener of the Arkansas Peace and Justice Memorial Movement and a Trustee of the Arkansas Historical Association. He talks about the details of June 19, 1965.  He also addresses how the way we discuss Juneteenth is related to how we talk about the white mob attack on Black Wall Street and the current discussion on critical race theory.
2. Fred Sims Jr. of Shoreline Organized Against Racism speaks about what Juneteenth means to him.
3. Artist, Myron Curry has worked on a Juneteenth mural in Shoreline.  Learning Black history has changed his life perspective.
4. Local resident, Leslie shares her experience learning about Juneteenth in San Jose, CA

Resources for things to do for Juneteenth:

South Seattle Emerald’s list of events

KCLS Juneteenth 2021 Poster

Photo: courtesy of City of Shoreline

Producers: Kevin Henry, Gol Holghooghi, Yuko Kodama