ASK Salt Spring: Answered - Ep 44 Damian Inwood

Episode Date: August 23, 2024

We talk to Damian President of Gulf Island Community Radio Society about various issues surrounding the launch of CHIR FM (107.9) including programming, The Record Shop, emergency broadcasting, the importance of volunteers and the 9 year journey to get on the FM broadcast air

Good day, I'm David Crouch and I'm sitting in for Damian Edwin and the reason is because Damian is actually the guest and was the guest on Ask Salt Spring Answered, where he covers everything about Go File and Community Radio and Cheer FM going live. Welcome, Damien. Yeah, thanks, David. Good to be here. That's great. We're now getting close to going on the air. And as everything's coming together, I know it's been frustrating, but what do you see as the vision for the station going live in for the next two or three years? Well, the vision is obviously primarily, first of all, to get on the FM wave band, and we're very close to that now.

And once we're on, we will be unveiling a whole raft of locally produced programs, good stuff about Salt Spring and the other Gulf Islands. And we will be increasing our podcasting and we will have a simultaneous stream going at the same time. And it'll be full of local content, which is our goal to be the voice of the Gulf Islands. And as the years go by, hopefully we will increase our reach and increase our programming and increase our volunteers because volunteers our programming and increase our volunteers because volunteers are the thing that drive this whole organization. Okay, let's break

that down a little bit. Now, one of the things I know we'll be getting on the air, but we're only going to be one of the two towers. So that's obviously one of the things that we'll be looking for in the future, right, is getting broader coverage on the FM dial. Yeah, our main transmitter only covers the north part of the island and the central part of the island and the south part of the island will have to be reached by the second transmitter, which will be on Mount Bruce. And we don't have a final date when that's going to go in yet, but it'll be sometime in the next 12 months. And for the other Gulf Islands, how does that, our coverage work? Well, our coverage basically, as FM is line of sight, we will be broadcasting towards the other Gulf Islands and they will, anybody on the west side of those islands will get our signal. If

you're on the east side, on the other side of the hills or mountain ranges, you unfortunately won't be able to hear us, but you will be able to still hear us on your computer. Okay, great. Now you've mentioned that our vision is to get lots of local programming. Can you just give us some insight into sort of our first draft of the programming that people should expect? Yeah, well, it's a very wide range. We've got a total of 25 shows which will be produced by local programmers, and they range anything from a morning show, a two-hour morning show, which will be staffed by possibly a number of different hosts during the week, to classical music, to a show about a deep dive into topics like housing and worker housing and all that kind of stuff, things that really are important on the Gulf Islands. We'll have some political content, and we'll have a show about classic rock albums, for example, and a movie show.

It's a very broad range. Jazz hour, we'll have blues, we'll have hip-hop, we'll have opera even. If you're an opera fan and like to go to Artspring and watch the opera from the Met, you'll be able to listen to opera on our station. We'll also be covering local political events and council meetings such as the local community commission and islands trust and those kind of things. And we'll be covering elections and other public events of interest as we go along. So you mentioned elections there. Do you think we'll get to any chance to cover the upcoming provincial election? Well, I think we'll get to any chance to cover the upcoming provincial election. Well, I think we'll be able to cover it.

I'm not absolutely confident we'll be on the FM by October the 18th. I don't have that date nailed down yet. But I'm hopeful, in the event that we haven't, we'll certainly be covering it on our stream with going to all candidates' meetings and interviewing various candidates and that kind of thing. Okay, great. Now, you've talked about this, and I know it's our first draft,

but if there's people out there that want to be programmers, is there still opportunities for some people in the community to pitch an idea for a program? For sure, yeah. I mean, we'd love to get more programmers. At this point, I think in our scheduling, we've basically, as I said, we have 25 new locally produced shows. We have a few that are already on the air from our streaming, and we have some syndicated shows that we're going to be running and are already running. But there was definitely room in our schedule for more. We are at this point covering those gaps by repeating some of these shows.

But yeah, we'd love to hear from new programmers and you can reach out to us. You can reach me on my email at president at GICRS.ca. Or you can leave me a message on my cell phone if you wish at 250-221-1766. Okay, that's great. Now, you also talked about in the vision is adding volunteers. Obviously, there's volunteers for programming, but what other types of volunteer could help us out in terms of getting going and up and operating on an ongoing basis? Well, we sort of need some people in the back end of the operation, particularly in the social media side of things. We'd love to have a social media coordinator. At this point, it's being done a

little bit piecemeal by various different people. We'd love to have a website guy to control our website. We'd like to have a volunteer coordinator who could actually keep track of all our programmers and make sure that they'll come in on time and fulfill their weekly shows and whatever. We'd love to have somebody who would just be here on a Saturday for our record shop, which runs on Saturdays from 11 till 3.

And it's a very enjoyable event where you get to meet the customers coming in. And it's a fun time. You basically just have to be there to take their money and answer their questions about music and that kind of thing. There's a wide variety of things we need. We have some people doing those tasks at the moment, but they're stretched a little bit thin. So the more people we get, the better.

At some point, we'll be going back to broadcasting from the Saturday market, and that's quite a big endeavor for us. We have to set up a tent and put our equipment out and this kind of thing. And then have somebody there to talk to people who pass by while the host programmer or DJ or whoever is on the air. They can't always get away from the mic to talk to people. So yeah, there's all kinds of fun things you can do to help out. Okay, that's great. Now you've mentioned there, the record shop. So why don't you tell. Now you've mentioned there the record shop. So why don't you tell people a little bit more about the record shop? Because I know

that is one of the main revenue sources for the station. It is, and it's a fabulous way of providing support for the radio station. And what's happened over the years, it's kind of evolved over time, but we've had people who donate their supplies of vinyl records, CDs, cassette tapes, DVDs, and also audio equipment. We have a raft of speakers here and various different audio stuff, turntables and amps and things like that. And yeah, basically, we just sell them at a reasonable price for local people to come and, you know, add to their music collections and that kind of thing. It's a great way. So if people have more music to donate, we're happy to take them. Anything except classical music, we just find that there is no demand for that, and we don't have the space to store it.

And, yeah, come on down and check us out because it's a great way to, as I say, take a trip down memory lane by looking at some of these album covers and looking at some of the artists you maybe had forgotten about from the 60s, 70s, right through. Yeah, it's a fun gig. So we play music live, and sometimes we broadcast from here at the 60s, 70s, right through. Yeah, it's a fun gig. So we play music live, and sometimes we broadcast from here at the same time, so you can hear a show going on in the background. And I think it's evolved into a place

that a lot of our regulars come to on a Saturday. And we have been getting people, starting to get people coming up, tourists actually finding us. Yeah, we've put some sandwich boards down in town telling people where it is, and they, I guess, look on their phones and follow the path up to Sims here, which is in the old middle school. We're in the portable classroom just outside the old middle school.

It's easy to get to. You just come in as if you were going to Mann Hall and then come up the hill behind Mann Hall, and we're at the end of the parking lot. That's great. So we heard about the record shop and I know, and we'll get into it a bit more later, but it's been a long road here. But how else have we generated revenues over the past nine years? Well, we've done some crowdfunding, of course. We have a GoFundMe, which is still active, actually, that people can donate to. You'll find it on our webpage. We have a lot of people who've donated money for different things. We've sold memberships.

We've got a special VIP membership called Club 107.9, which people use. They donate $107.90 and give them certain perquisites that are attractive to them. And it's a big help for us to keep our operating going and our capital funding, which has been considerable. We've had to raise in excess of $50,000 in the last couple of years just to buy the equipment we need to carry on with the organization. And one other thing that I think we were very lucky at was getting some special VIP large donations. We did.

And Sue and Larry Walker were one of our biggest donors. They gave us a large chunk of money. And we've actually put a sign up in the studio that says the Walker Woods Studio. So we really appreciate that. We've had another person who prefers to remain anonymous, who's given us considerable funds too. And quite honestly, we couldn't have got where we are today without that. So, you know, any donation is appreciated. But if you do happen to have a few thousand dollars

that you want to get rid of, we'd be happy to talk to you about that. Now, one of the issues that came up in the Ask Salt Spring session, and it was a key part of why the community would want a radio on, is for emergency broadcasting. So can you tell us a little bit about that? Particularly, what came up was, what's the resilience that we're trying to build in here to make sure that we can stay on the air? Well, from that point of view, the resilience is basically putting in backup power so that in the event we have another windstorm like we had in 2018 and the power goes out in a widespread way, we can actually keep broadcasting. And we would do that by a combination of things of generators and battery backup power, which would keep us on

the air indefinitely, certainly as far as the main transmitter goes anyway, because we are able to transmit from our studio at Sims by radio frequency to our tower. So we're not reliant on the internet or anything else that could go down with a power failure. We don't need that to carry on broadcasting. So that's something that we've built in because it is a very important part of our broadcasting mandate. And it's actually a term of our license that we are here to help people in the event of an emergency. And it's a very important part of our mandate, and we're spending considerable time getting the right equipment so that we can set out the national and regional alerts

for things that may affect us. And also we will be working closely with the Salt Spring Emergency Program folks who will be dropping into our studio to give you all the latest news on places to go, safe havens if you need one, places to stay warm, places to charge your phones up in the event that your power's out,

and all kinds of important information for people in the case of an emergency, where to get water if you can't use your well. There's a whole bunch of things that we would be doing and spreading information about. Okay, that's great. Now, another really good question that came up, I thought, at the session was, it's taken us a long time and we're going to get into that in a little minute here, but what's the succession the succession planning obviously you've been the key person driving with the drive and the personality to get from limited place to where we're just about to go on the on the air what about succession what do you how do you see that working well it's a tough one. I suppose it takes a certain kind of individual to do this kind of work. And what I'm hoping is that once we get the station off the ground, and we will be increasing our volunteer base considerably compared to what it is now, we've already got those people who've committed to be volunteers for doing shows and things like that.

Amongst that stable of people, there will be people who might consider taking on the running or planning or operating of the station in some capacity or other. Hopefully, I'll be able to step back a little bit from it. I have been involved for, what, nine years? No, well, almost nine years, yeah, since I came to Salt Spring, and it has been a long haul, as you say. And, yeah, it would be great to have somebody who would be prepared to step in, and that would be excellent. In the event that we don't have that, I think I've said I'm good for a couple

more years in this position if the board agrees to keep me on. And I'm prepared to do that. But after that, I will have reached, gone past a rather significant age milestone and wouldn't mind having a little bit more time to uh to dig the garden and do other things yeah well one of the issues that came up i mean we will be switching from a very hard entrepreneurial fundraising tackling problems and we're going to hear about them to wrap up the program here but people talked about well possibly maybe having some one or two paid positions. What are your thoughts about that? Yeah, we have in our budgeting

plans for the station, hopefully by the second year, we would have generated enough income from various sources, which could be a number of different things like certain grants we'd be available for, you know, some sponsorships for programming and that kind of thing. And, you know, other subscriptions, there's a wide variety of ways that we could increase our income and that we would be able to pay a station manager. It's not going to be, you know, a huge budget job, but it will be significant income for somebody, the right person who wanted to take it on. And we would also like to have somebody who would actually work as a advertising slash publicity kind of a person to bring in some of those dollars through local businesses and that kind of thing

who would then um you know would would help keep the uh the station afloat and they would probably be on a commission shared commission salary basis we haven't got hard figures on any of that yet but it's definitely in our plans so if you have a yen to be a station manager or to go out selling advertising for in the community then come and talk to us about it okay to wrap up now there's a lot of people that of course knew about the old program or the old station we don't really want to talk about that but it's really been nine years since the demise of that and the start of Gulf Island Community Radio. And for a lot of people don't know, it was a long story. And they think, well, why didn't we just get it going right away?

Lead us through briefly the history on why it did take this long and the huge obstacles that were encountered. Yeah, well, it's a very complex thing to set up a radio station from scratch. And unfortunately, when the old station folded, everything went with it. They didn't leave any of the equipment behind. The studio was gone. Everything was gone, basically. So we had to start from square one.

But the main problem is that in order to get a successful license application through the CRTC, the Canadian Radio and Telecommunications Commission, you need to have a very detailed engineering study done, which costs a lot of money. And you then need to have a very detailed application, which takes months to fulfill and draw up. And so what happened was between 2015 and 2018, it took us that long to do those things. And it cost us, the engineering studies alone cost us $25,000, which we had to, you know, raise money for. And then we filed the report in 2018. And of course, then COVID came along and the CRTC really

didn't kind of shut down and didn't consider any applications, I think, for a couple of years. And we didn't end up getting the license approval until 2022, January of 2022. So that was already seven years on from when this thing first started. And since then, we've been raising the money we need to actually buy the equipment to be a terrestrial radio station, which is over $50,000. We've kind of been doing some pretty good budgeting and cutting our expenses back as much as possible. So to make it as economical as we can. And it took us a year and a half just to raise the 50 grand we needed for that. So all in all, and then of course, we've ordered the equipment, supply chain issues have happened. There's been some problems, technical problems with actually attaching some of the

antennas and it goes on and on. So the delays are longer than we would have liked, but unfortunately, they are pretty much out of our control. Okay. Anything else you'd like to tell our listeners today? Well, just that radio is such an important part of life, particularly in the case of an emergency, but just in daily life. I mean, I don't know about some people now don't listen to the radio, but a lot of people still do in their cars, I know. And you'll be able to drive around Salt Spring and find out news about what's going on on the island. If you have a radio in your kitchen, you'll be able to flip it on in the morning while your coffee's brewing and listen to a morning show or whatever and get the latest on the ferries and the weather and so on. And as you said, in the case of an emergency, it's a vital link between

the emergency organizing people and the citizens to know exactly what's going on. And I know we've seen, particularly recently in some of the cases with forest fires in the Northwest Territories and northern Alberta and places, how vital those radio links have been in order to actually provide almost life-saving information to people. And, you know, we keep our fingers crossed that we won't be suffering anything like that here, but we did have the windstorm in 2018, which I think was a signal to what could happen. And we hope it never happens, but we have to be ready for it when it does. And if it does happen, we'll be there for the people here to make sure they know exactly what's going on. Okay, great. Thanks very much, Damien. Oh, thanks for having me, David. All right. Cheers. Okay.