WRFI Receives Community Empowerment Grant from Ithaca Pride Alliance to create local LGBTQ history radio episodes
WRFI has received it's first ever Community Empowerment Grant from the Ithaca Pride Alliance!
WRFI Community Radio is the recipient of a micro-grant from the Ithaca Pride Alliance to record and broadcast a series of local history audio "mini-sodes" highlighting queer artists, musicians, and queer community spaces in Ithaca and greater Tompkins County from the 20th century.
Local queer history efforts have worked tirelessly over the last decade to increase the visibility of historic LGBTQ+ narratives in our community, but without consistent effort and integration into our daily lives, these stories don’t become common knowledge. Drawing on the research developed to produce the Ithaca LGBT History Walking Tour in 2019 and the LGBTQ+ Print Cultures Walking Tour in 2023, we plan to create a series of 10 one-to-two minute “mini-sodes” that will air multiple times each over the time period of this grant. The funding request supports the development and production costs for 4-5 of these episodes, and WRFI will match this funding through a donation of staff time and resources to develop an additional 5-6 episodes for the series to round out at 10 minisodes that will air regularly in 2026 and 2027.
Some names and locations we want to highlight include: Wendy Carlos, Harry Partch, Julius Eastman, Firebrand Books, Smedley’s Bookshop, and Common Ground among others. Radio friendly scripts will be developed from the research already completed on the LGBTQ themed walking and driving tours developed for Tompkins County over the last 5 years. Each minisode will be recorded by LGBTQ+ DJs and show hosts already affiliated with WRFI Community Radio, furthering the representation of local queer voices on the station airwaves.
Particularly when queer voices and narratives are being more forcefully excluded from media coverage and public spaces nationally we at WRFI think that joyful and appreciative inclusion through a local history lens has the possibility to shift perspectives and educate more of our listening audience on the impact and contributions of queer community on our local culture.
Our thanks to the Ithaca Pride Alliance for supporting this project, to DJ Danielle Bass of Monsoon Radio who encouraged the station to apply for this project, and to Luca Maurer and Dr. Jeffry Iovannone respectively for giving WRFI permission to use research and content from the walking tours to introduce these local histories to new audiences.