Get Funding for your Knowledge -- Funding for Documentation of Best Practices in Community Radio!

Many low power FM stations have, through much experimentation, generated a ton of expertise on many key elements involved in running a radio station. We wrote a grant (that has been now been funded by the Surdna Foundation) that can give your station a bit of cash, and can benefit the rest of the movement by your knowledge. If you are finishing a handbook we already started, your station gets $800. if you are writing a new one from scratch, you get $1000.

Over the next few months, we will be commissioning handbooks on these topics: 

1) Automation $1000

2) Fundraising $800

3) Station governance $800

4) Station budgets $1000

5) Programming policy $1000

6) Towers and masts $800

7) Measuring your  stations' impact for the community $1000

Stations should respond with a 1 page statement of interest, and our staff will select the best candidate to write the handbook.   Please  let us know a little bit about  how you plan to approach the topic of the handbook, and who the key people at your station will be  working on it. The handbook will need to document the experience and choices of the station, and include material from at least five other stations for their solutions to the same problems.  

This project will help alleviate the Prometheus staff tendency to act like a bunch of know-it-alls, and relieve some of the tendency to duplicate the research that occurs in grassroots efforts.  It will also encourage stations to get in touch with each other and network, building ties that can be helpful in movement building.  We will give a thorough review to all materials and make sure that they are not overly specific to one station or a certain subset of stations that we work with.  We generally expect that this handbook will be a group effort for your station, incorporating ideas from technical and non-technical people from the station.  This is about technology and it's impact - how our groups choose to use it (as opposed to being used by it)! Same goes for the handbooks on non-technical issues, like governance. 

The handbook can range from 10 to 25 pages. Final handbooks will end up on our website, and published on paper.  It should be technical, but also philosophical and organizational in nature.  Handbooks in various poetic forms, such as sonnets, limericks, pirate jabber, funk lyrics, or haiku are welcome, but they must be fully informative.  We like pictures too! The deadline for statements of interest will be July 15th. Authoring stations will be announced by August 1, and finished draft will be due November 1.