WRFI Receives Grant from Sustainable Finger Lakes for Community Announcements

We are excited to announce that WRFI Community Radio is a recipient of a Neighborhood Mini-Grant from Sustainable Finger Lakes! 

WRFI submitted a first-time application to Sustainable Finger Lakes this fall to expand our on-air Public Service Announcements to include a series on sustainable resources, programs, funding, and services offered across our listening area.

Our hope is that this outreach series will broaden awareness of sustainable options and resources across the Southern Finger Lakes, and support the outreach and engagement efforts of organizations that focus on environmentalism and community resources throughout the year. The goal of this series is to create a more educated listening audience that actively engages with environmental options and programs within the region and further WRFI's personal core values of justice, sustainability, and integrity. 

Radio is free, and our daily listeners seek out WRFI as an independent media source for news and music. Our listening community trusts us to exclusively air announcements that are immediately relevant to them and their lives in the Finger Lakes. A series like this would be a first for our organization, but build on our existing practices of interviewing and highlighting individuals working in green energy and restorative justice spaces, and hosting sustainable programs in our community, like the 2025 “What’s Next Ithaca” series, and the Food and Country film screening we hosted at Cinemapolis in September 2024. 

Particularly with the expansion of the Neighborhood Mini-Grant this year to include Schuyler County for the first time, it felt like a valuable opportunity for our station to share sustainable programs available to our listeners across Tompkins and Schuyler counties to encourage a more just and resilient Finger Lakes community as a whole. We were thrilled that Sustainable Finger Lakes was enthusiastic about our proposal, and is supporting our station with a one-time Neighborhood Mini-Grant to support the coordination and production of these announcements. 

We are connecting with potential community partners this winter, and hope to begin airing announcements in January/February 2026. Stay tuned to your local community station, and think of ways to shift your own spheres of influence into more environmentally sustainable options.