This November 30 marks the 20th anniversary of the protests against meetings of the World Trade Organization that shut down the city of Seattle. It also marks the birthday of the Indymedia movement, which brought together grassroots media activists from public access TV, print, community radio and internet technology to create a radical open publishing system and network of affiliated centers that let citizen journalists instantaneously publish words, sound, pictures and video years before the advent of YouTube or Twitter.

In the U.S. this movement helped to further solidify much of the support for what would become low-power FM community radio. Established just two months later, in January 2000, LPFM allowed for the greatest expansion of community radio in history. Though the Indymedia movement was not a formal causal agent in the creation of LPFM, that energy sparked at the WTO helped to spur media activists to take advantage of the new service.

With these coming anniversaries, we at Radio Survivor would like to help tell this history, which still remains poorly documented. We need your support to do this.

We’re need to have 100 people making monthly contributions to our Patreon fundraising campaign by July 1, 2019 August 1, 2019. That will allow us to allocate the time and resources necessary to do the reporting, writing and product needed to begin telling this story on our radio show and website beginning with the November 30. For some of us, this means being able to prioritize this work over other freelance gigs or having the ability to do travel that is otherwise out of reach.

As of July 22 we have 42 monthly contributors, so that means we have 58 patrons to go. The good news is that it only takes a contribution of $1 a month to get us closer to our goal, though it’s great if you can contribute more.

To say thank-you, all of our patrons get access to bonus content, including bonus episodes of our podcast, ready-to-print radio station postcards and more. With contributions of $20 or more you can become an underwriter on our show, getting a monthly announcement that you’ll co-write with us.

We think this is an important history that risks being forgotten. In particular we think it’s vital for today’s community broadcasters, podcasters and listeners to know and learn from. When you support our work you help to educate thousands of community media activists while preserving this record for the future.

Please join our Patreon now to support this work.

Don’t hesitate drop us a line if you have any questions or suggestions.