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After most ASK Salt Spring events, CHIR.fm interviews the guest or guests about the highlights of the question and answer session from the event. Thanks so much to Gayle Walker for facilitating this. Hear the major points these important speakers make.
Good day. I'm David Crouch, and I'm sitting in for Damien Inwood. And the reason is because Damien 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.
Damian Inwood:Yeah. Thanks, David. Good to be here.
David Crouch: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 2 or 3 years?
Damian Inwood: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 good stuff about Salt Spring and, the other Gulf Islands. And we will be increasing our podcasting, and, we will have a a simultaneous stream going, at the same time, and, it'll be full of local content, which is our 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 are the thing that drive this whole organization.
David Crouch: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 gonna be 1 of the 2 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.
Damian Inwood: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 gonna go in yet, but it'll be sometime in the next 12 months.
David Crouch:And for the other Gulf Islands, how does that, our coverage work?
Damian Inwood: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 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.
David Crouch: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?
Damian Inwood:Yeah. Well, it's a 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 2 hour morning show, which will be staffed by possibly a number of a number of different hosts during the week to classical music to a a show about, a deep dive into topics like housing and, you know, worker housing and all that kind of stuff. Things that really are important on 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.
Damian Inwood:It's a very broad range. Jazz hour, we'll have, blues, we'll have hip hop, we'll have opera or 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 the, you know, 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 of interest as we go along.
David Crouch:So you mentioned elections there. Do you think, we'll get to any, chance to cover the, upcoming provincial election?
Damian Inwood:Well, I think we'll be able to cover it. I'm not absolutely confident we'll be on the FM by October 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, you know, all candidates meetings and interviewing various candidates and that kind of thing.
David Crouch:Okay. Great. Now you've talked about this and and I know it's our 1st draft, but, if there's people out there that wanna be programmers, is there still opportunities for some people in the community to pitch a, an idea for a program?
Damian Inwood: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 we and are already running.
Damian Inwood: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@gicsrs.ca, or you can leave me a message on my cell phone if you wish at 250-221-1766.
David Crouch: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 and and up and operating on an ongoing basis?
Damian Inwood:Well, we sort of need some people in the back end of, 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 various different people. We'd love to have a website, guide 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 all come in on time and, and fulfill their their weekly, shows and whatever.
Damian Inwood:We'd 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 they, you know, it's, it's a fun time. You basically just have to be there to take their money and, and then answer their questions about about music and that kind of thing. There's a wide variety of of things we need. We have some people doing those those tasks at the moment, but they're stretched a little bit thin.
Damian Inwood: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. So we have to set up a tent and put our equipment out and this kind of thing. And and then have somebody there to talk to people who pass by while the, pros 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 there's all kinds of, fun things you can do to help out.
David Crouch:Okay. That's great. 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 the main, revenue sources for the station.
Damian Inwood:It is. And it's a 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 and, you know, add to their music collections and that kind of thing.
Damian Inwood:It's a it's a great way. So if if people have more music to donate, we're we're happy to take them. Anything except classical music, we just find that there is no, demand for that and it, we don't have the space to store it. And, yeah. Come on down and 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 from the sixties, seventies right through, yeah.
Damian Inwood:It's a fun 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, yeah, I think it's evolved into, some a place that a lot of our regulars come to on a Saturday.
David Crouch:And we have been getting, people starting to get people coming up, tourists actually finding
Damian Inwood:us. Yeah. We've, put some sandwich boards down in town, telling people how you know, 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 We're in the portable classroom just outside the the old middle school. It's easy to get to.
Damian Inwood:You just, come in as if you're going to Mann Hall and then come up the hill behind Mann Hall, and we're at the end of the parking lot.
David Crouch: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, over the past 9 years?
Damian Inwood:Well, we've done some crowd funding, of course. We have a GoFundMe which is still active actually that people can donate to. You'll you'll find it on our web page. We have a lot of people who've donated money for different things. We've sold memberships.
Damian Inwood:We've got a special VIP membership called Club 107.9, which people use. They they donate a $107.90 and gives them certain perquisites that are, you know, attractive to them. And it 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 to carry on with the organization.
David Crouch:And, one other thing that I that I think we were very lucky at was was getting some some special VIP large donations.
Damian Inwood:We did. And, we had, 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, that we really appreciate of that. We've had another, person who prefers to remain anonymous who's given us considerable funds too.
Damian Inwood: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 a few $1,000, that you want to get rid of, we'd be happy to talk to you about that.
David Crouch:Now one of the issues that came up in the, asphalt spring session, and it was a 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 that we're trying to build in here to make sure that we can stay on the air?
Damian Inwood:Well the 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 on 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. You know, we we don't need that to carry on broadcasting. So that's something that we've built in because it is a 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.
Damian Inwood:And it's a very important part of our, our mandate and we've we're spending considerable time getting the right equipment so that we can set out the national and regional alerts for things that may 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 safe havens if you need 1, places to stay warm, places to charge your phones up in the event that, your power's out, and all the all kinds of, important information for people in the in the case of an emergency, where to get water if, you can't use your well. There's there's a whole bunch of things that we would be doing and spreading information about.
David Crouch: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 gonna get into that in a little minute here, but what's 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 the air. What about succession?
David Crouch:What do you how do you see that working?
Damian Inwood: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 to be volunteers for doing shows and things like that. But, amongst that, that stable of people, there will be people who might consider, you know, taking on the running or or planning or operating of the station in in some some capacity or other.
Damian Inwood:And, hopefully, I'll be able to step back a little bit from it. I have been involved for, what, 9 years no. Well, almost 9 years. Yeah. Since I came to Salisbury, and it it has been a long haul as you say.
Damian Inwood:And, yeah, it would be great to have somebody who would be prepared to step in, and that would that would be excellent. In the event that, we don't have that, I think, I'm 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 I'm prepared to do that but after that, I will have reached, gone past a rather significant age milestone and, would wouldn't mind, having a little bit more time to, to dig the garden and do other things.
David Crouch: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 gonna hear about them to wrap up the program here. But people talked about, well, possibly maybe having some some 1 or 2 paid positions. What are your thoughts about that?
Damian Inwood:Yeah. We have in our in our budgeting plans for the station. Hopefully, by the 2nd year, we would have generated enough income from from various sources, which could be a number of different things like certain certain grants we'd be available for, you know, some sponsorships for programming and that kind of thing. And, you know, other other, subscriptions, there's a wide variety of ways that we could increase our our income, and that we would be able to pay to pay a station manager. It's not gonna be, you know, a huge budget job, but it will would be significant income for somebody, the right person who wanted to take it on.
Damian Inwood: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, you know, would would help keep the, 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 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.
David Crouch:Okay. To wrap up now, there's a lot of people that of course knew about the old program or the the old station. We don't really wanna talk about that, but it's really been 9 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? Feed us through briefly the history on why it did take this long and and the the huge obstacles that, were encountered.
Damian Inwood:Yeah. Well, it's, 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.
Damian Inwood:Everything was gone, basically. So we had to start from square 1, but the 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 to fulfill and draw up. And so what happened was between 2015 and 2018, it took us that long to to do those things, and it cost us, the 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, cut cut, 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.
Damian Inwood:So that was already 7 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, and so to to make it as economical as we can. And it took us a year and a half just to raise the $50 we needed for that. So all in all and then, of course, we've ordered the equipment, supply chain issues have happened.
Damian Inwood:There's been some problems, technical problems with, actually attaching some of the antennas and it 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.
David Crouch:Okay. Anything else you'd, like to tell our listeners today?
Damian Inwood:Well, just that radio is such an important part of of life in particularly in the case of an emergency, but just in daily life. I mean, I 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.
Damian Inwood:And, I know we've seen particularly recently in some of the cases with forest fires in Northern, in the Northwest Territories and Northern Alberta in 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.
David Crouch:Okay. Great. Thanks very much, Damian.
Damian Inwood:Oh, thanks for having me, David.
David Crouch:Alright. Cheers. Okay.