Meet KBOO's New Station Co-Managers

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KBOO is open to the public! To visit the station, contact your staff person or call 503-231-8032.


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Published date: 
Friday, February 10, 2017 - 11:30am
Delphine Criscenzo and Gil Cardon started on February 1st, 2017.

Dear, KBOO Community,

 

As current KBOO members and volunteers, we have experienced first-hand why KBOO is so important to the world and are truly invested in building on KBOO’s fifty-year legacy! We are very excited about this opportunity to be Station Co-Managers, as we believe that our collective skills and experiences will greatly contribute to KBOO’s success. The atmosphere at KBOO is very unassuming and welcoming, so that people from all walks of life can be a part of the community and join in a KBOO event, a training class, or fundraising campaign and feel like they belong. The experience of working with fellow volunteers and the staff at KBOO is very fulfilling and eye-opening and we are thrilled at the opportunity to expand these relationships.  There are many things that make KBOO unique and special in our opinion, and we are dedicated to fostering them all. But it is the commitment to independent grassroots community media, a progressive perspective, and building a diverse community working together for social justice that make KBOO profoundly important.  

 

KBOO is powerful because it is an independent, grassroots community radio station which is part of a long-standing legacy of community media in the world. This listener-supported model was created in 1949 in Berkeley, CA to be a platform for community creativity, and now serves as the main medium for grassroots organizing in rural Uganda, Peru, and elsewhere. From community radio immerged a media outlet focused on broadcasting underrepresented voices in the rest of the media, sharing knowledge and skills, and building community agency and resilience. KBOO has been a part of this movement for almost fifty years, and as Station Co-Managers we will ensure the continued involvement of KBOO with networks such as Oregon Community Media and Cascade Media Convergence, but also seek new opportunities to share content, strategies and resources with community radios across the globe. We believe that this model invites meaningful community participation  by spreading the gifts of journalism, audio production, live music mixology, DJing, and more. By doing so, it democratizes the way we share knowledge and create media content by giving ordinary people access. KBOO is a gem because it is a hub for skill exchange, information dissemination, community organizing, and activism. As Station Co-Managers, we will strive to strengthen our training capacity, our listener, member and volunteer bases, and spread the gift of KBOO and community radio for generations to come.

 

We feel privileged that Portlanders before us created and fostered a space for inclusive participation and progressive perspectives that we can now benefit from and build onto. The KBOO community is important because it aims to bring about radical change and develop a just and egalitarian society where everyone can strive, a Beloved Community, where all are welcomed and entitled to fulfilling their creative potential while holding every individual accountable. These values are reflected in everything KBOO does, including the programming it broadcasts, the events it organizes, the community outreach opportunities KBOO engages in, and its “commitment to the voices of oppressed and underserved communities” (from KBOO Mission statement). The balanced diversity of content KBOO exhibits is very hard to find elsewhere, but in the local communities that contribute their message on the air. In an effort to preserve and increase this diversity, KBOO has shown in recent years a heightened commitment to anti-oppression and to engaging in conversation for addressing the ways KBOO excludes. As Station Co-Managers we are excited to be able to build on the work that a group of volunteers, of which we were a part, have started under the name Beloved Community and made a priority at KBOO. We believe that growing anti-oppression efforts at KBOO can only spread the love we have for the community, as well as disperse our progressive perspectives and expand our reputation for being an agent for “equitable social change”(from KBOO Mission statement).

 

The unique community that KBOO has created and fostered for almost fifty years draws from the talents and skills of everyone involved, including staff, volunteers, members, listeners, and ties with partner organizations. The KBOO community emphasizes the importance of social justice, collaboration, inclusion of diverse backgrounds, and the decolonization “of mass consciousness” (from KBOO Vision statement). Recently KBOO staff and volunteers worked together to introduce Martin Luther King Jr.’s concept of Beloved Community to the community by creating and maintaining Anti-Oppression workshops and monthly discussions. We have both been involved in these efforts which are now an integral part of KBOO’s three-year strategic plan and therefore will be central to our work as Station Co-Managers. But KBOO’s community is not geographically limited to the Portland area and our listenership, membership, and partnerships stretch across the nation. We also constantly raise awareness of ongoing unjust circumstances such as Standing Rock and the Leonard Peltier case. In addition to working with local businesses and government agencies, KBOO has built bridges to collaborate with international groups in order to further grassroots initiatives around the world.  Through its various successes and achievements over the years, KBOO has garnered the attention and support of national independent media contemporaries such as Amy Goodman, David Barsamian, and Greg Palast. Building community is central to KBOO and it will be central to our day to day operations.

 

Delphine has been transformed by her involvement with community radio and has used this tool for the last eight years to bring about change through storytelling. She has been facilitating radio workshops for youth in the community since 2013. She is a multimedia producer and trainer with a journalism degree and freelance experience. Her social and professional networks are extensive and will benefit the station greatly. Since she joined the KBOO community five years ago, Delphine has been involved with growing the training department in collaboration with program staff and has served in several leadership position on the KBOO Foundation Board of Directors. While on the Strategic Planning Support Work Group, Delphine helped with the creation of a Mission and Vision for KBOO as well as with the development of a three year strategic plan for the station. Delphine has over a decade experience working in the nonprofit sector for the Native American Community Center of Bloomington, for four different mental health services providers, for World Pulse, Village Gardens and Rosemary Anderson High School. She is dedicated to a grassroots process and has held several leadership and management positions very effectively and successfully, such as when she was the Interim Program Director for Village Gardens. She has extensive experience with program development and management as well as with fundraising. She is highly collaborative and dedicated to democratically run processes. She is an effective communicator with high-level conflict resolution skills who has a lot of experience working with a wide variety of people including at KBOO.

 

With over six years collective experience in management of a global non-profit organization and an independent artist cooperative, Gil brings experience and skills that are a perfect match for the responsibilities of the Station Manager position. He has a broad range of public relations experience, having built strong relationships in local and international regions, including serving as a Foreign Language Instructor and Cultural Ambassador in Japan for three years. Additionally, his seven-year background spearheading sales and marketing initiatives will undoubtedly contribute to reaching KBOO’s annual revenue goals.  Through his promotional activities in working with artists in New York City and Portland, he has also increasingly advanced his skills using various media channels to successfully publicize and popularize the creative projects of the local artist community.  Gil has produced and co-produced live music festivals in New York such as the CBGB Music & Film Festival, as well as fundraising events such as the “Silent Disco/Silent Auction Benefit for KBOO” and the “United We Stand-Up Comedy Show” in Portland. As a volunteer with KBOO, Gil has given back to the community by using his skills training as a Live Music Engineer and On-Air Guest DJ, and most recently served as a member on the KBOO Board of Directors.  As a Co-Manager with Delphine, Gil is very optimistic that we can all work together to firmly establish KBOO’s core values within the organization, as well as to grow and proliferate those values to the local, national, and international communities who have shared ideologies.

 

As Station Co-Manager we are availble to answer any questions you might have about us or KBOO, so feel free to contact us at del@kboo.fm or gil@kboo.fm.

 

Thank you for making our community great!

 

Del and Gil

KBOO Station Co-Managers