COMMUNITIES AMPLIFIED

Creating a network of community radio studios is an approach to uniting communities and fostering collaborative dialogue. Strategically selecting Chicago’s bridgehouses to serve as a network of community-accessed radio stations envisions these underutilized infrastructures as civic magnets, gathering cultural life along the Chicago River. This new civic platform will provide Chicago’s diverse communities the access and agency to share quality media and local cultural content, bridging disparate communities by amplifying their voices and sounds. Chicago’s multilingual histories and stories will echo up and down the river and through our neighborhoods.

Communities Amplified trains new radio producers from communities in Chicago and expands multilingual programming on Lumpen Radio. This project aims to reach a multicultural, immigrant audience to further develop a community that incorporates multiple immigrant experiences. Public Media Institute’s low power FM radio station, (WLPN 105.5), combined as it is with online streaming and archiving, is a platform for a vital and diffused dialogue, where people share ideas, sounds, and events within their communities, and are also able to broadcast culture to a much wider public in the city and the globe.

Community Amplified Stations will help to build and strengthen solidarities among Chicago’s historically oppressed and segregated communities and be a catalyst for cross-river and city-wide engagement.

This project is in partnership with the fine folks at The Public Media Institute. If you don’t know them already, check them out!