What is a Barnraising?

Since 2002, Prometheus Radio Project has partnered with community groups that have received a construction permit to build their station. These groups have waited a long time for the chance to build their stations, and the construction permit allows them to move ahead in the process. After receiving the permit, they have eighteen months to build the station and begin to deliver regular, community-based programming to their cities and towns.

For certain of these community groups, Prometheus volunteers crowd into trains, planes, and automobiles and rush to the site of the station to get it on the air! In the spirit of neighbors pulling together to put up a new building, Prometheus gathers Low Power FM radio applicants, journalists, radio engineers, students, lawyers, musicians, activists and folks from across the country to raise the antenna mast, build the studio, and flip on the station switch... all over a long weekend!

Dr. Kate Coyer, a refugee from corporate radio with a PhD in Communications, and a radio barnraising audio production instructor described the feeling well:

"I am never again going to a conference without a power tool in my hand."

What happens at a Barnraising?

Communities come together to build a radio station, and help it grow into the future!

Barnraising weekends are much more than a team of a few volunteer engineers tuning a transmitter and raising a tower. Each Barnraising produces a radio station, yes.  But what's more is that hundreds of volunteers- both new and old- come ready to support the new station and sharpen their valuable technical and organizing skills to pass on to other stations all across the country. Barnraising attendees also work tirelessly to expand Low Power FM; they inspire communities who have been left out of the process to fight to bring more stations to people all across America. After building, teaching, and learning at our sixth Radio Barnraising in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, September 10th-12^th, 2004, Jane Braaten, of Valley Free Radio in Northhampton, Massachusetts, said it best:

"The main thing was the spirit of the gathering - it was a diligent, common effort by a very motley group of people. The second most important thing was that it is possible to create a radio station from scratch - and from the volunteer efforts of a bunch of dedicated, yet more-or-less inexperienced people, just as they are. Even us nobodies can do it!"