A long-time member of WBAI and a veteran of some of its more intense internal wars, I am returning to ask for your votes to help WBAI fulfill its mission (see the Pacifica Foundation link below) and continue work I began years ago. Between 2004 and 2014 I was elected to six WBAI Local Station Boards and to the National Board multiple times. The mission and potential of Pacifica have always been there for inspiration, and I hope to once again help us reach some of those beautiful goals that have inspired so many of us for so long. I was the organizer and first chair of the National Election Committee (although I had not yet been voted onto the National Board) and my interest has always been in educating voting members and listeners to the possibilities of the station and network. (For more personal history too long for this statement, email me directly.) I moved to Philadelphia to begin a long career teaching research and technical writing at a community college there. When I moved back to NYC I was again involved in WBAI but the internal politics were vicious, distracting, and depressing, keeping WBAI from entering the new world of Internet, cross-pollination of media, and social media. Although I dropped out officially after 2016 I have never lost interest in how the station is doing, and especially how it was addressing the attempts to buy/sell/swap it. Now I’d like to work with people unaffiliated with any one faction at WBAI (there are quite a few such members and board members) and work to keep the station from being sold, swapped, swallowed up, or used by other interests: we are not Pacifica’s cash cow. We need to expand the programming, work with social media, reach out to communities that need and will support us. (Look at some of the programming in the Pacifica Archives – link below - if you want an idea of how eclectic Pacifica’s outreach has been in the past.). I hope that going forward we can reduce the factionalism, keep the station intact, and bring it into today’s media world. There’s a lot to do. We need to improve communication with listeners (a newsletter) , increase programming outreach to various ethnic and social groups in our listening area, help the station become financially self-sustaining, and integrate other media into the station’s profile. I’m a member of WBAI’s Community Advisory Board and would like to work as a member of the LSB going forward: we need liaisons with other media. I am happy to see people interested in all of the above among candidates on this list, and hope we can work together to bring WBAI closer to fulfilling its mission.
https://pacifica.org/about_mission.php
https://pacificaradioarchives.org/

Please write or call at 212 932 2422, or birden.carolyn@yahoo.com to discuss your concerns and suggestions: I will happily discuss why I want to serve on the WBAI Local Station Board again, and would like to hear your thoughts, suggestions, and issues.