The importance of Vancouver Co-op Radio and ensuring its voices are heard!

Program Title: Radio Can Get Messy, All about community radio CFRO FM
Description: The first episode of The Conversation Lab begins this Sunday. It will be on air at 10 am and available on many podcasting platforms. As CFRO FM has offered to help produce this program and give up some of its airtime, I thought learning more about Vancouver’s community radio station would be a good place to start. Co-op Radios Executive Director Bryan McKinnon and Meenakshi Mannoe former Board Chair and member of the CRES Board of Directors (Community Radio Education Society) talk about the station’s past, present and future.

Contributing to Co-op Radio has been fun as well as a refreshing if not a reminder how important local radio is. Now that I’m one of three hundred volunteers, I can feel the edges of my career unfold from when I was the “gofer” who ran for coffee and copy, played and said whatever I wanted when on the air at our campus radio station, as well as a few others along the way as I learned the art and business of broadcasting. Then, of course, the day Roundhouse Radio went off the air was when I/we fell into the abyss and was once again reminded of how precious these voices and different points of view are.

The Vancouver Foundation Engagement and Connections Report provided a glimpse of why these voices are important as it described “Metro Vancouver as a hard place to make friends, our neighbourhood connections as cordial, but weak, with a declining level of participation in community life.” I believe that the more we can do to build bridges into our community to learn about each other through our stories and shared experiences that we can make a difference. So yes, "radio can get messy" as Meenakshi reminds us in our conversation.

I expect that The Conversation Lab will get messy as well at times as we learn more from community organizations, not for profits and change makers that are doing great work all around us. Their stories will weave an interdisciplinary path that may help bring our community and our world a little bit closer as we talk about gender, race, religion, politics, climate, homelessness, kids, or whatever. Understanding this interconnectedness may help broaden our understanding of this complex ecosystem. After all, there are no shortage of important things to talk about.

I hope you will join us and please - support your local radio station. Don’t take it for granted!

Host(s): Don Shafer
Featured Speakers/Guests: Meenakshi Mannoe Bryan McKinnon Don Shafer

Credits: Producer Kimit Sekhon, Don Shafer, Bryan McKinnon

Comments:

Topic: Society and Culture Type: Interview

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Listen (h:mm:ss) 0:57:54	Bryan McKinnon & Meenakshi Manno The Conversation Lab - Co op Radio	Download (2)
	tcl_ep1_co_op_radio_bm_mm_6May2019.mp3	94,714k 128kbps Stereo
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