Hey guys -- I'm Hannah Sassaman. For the past six years I've been an organizer at the Prometheus Radio Project -- working to expand community radio station availability to every city in the country. As I transition out of Prometheus (and head over to do political communications with SEIU), I'm getting some perspective on the two major worlds I've come from -- and my vision of how totally kickass policy change can happen, now and in the future.
Those two worlds. One of those worlds is a policy world. With my single, all-weather, threadbare suit, I've walked the halls of Capitol Hill, fighting the big broadcasters as they've tried to keep community radio out of our cities. With great allies like Free Press, Future of Music, the United Church of Christ, the National Hispanic Media Coalition, and many other members of the Media and Democracy Coalition, I learned about horsetrading and bargaining and swaps. Our bill, the Local Community Radio Act, is on its way to pass this year or next -- finally expanding community radio to thousands of towns, eight years after it was crippled by big broadcasters. What an education. What a ride.
But everything I've learned in Washington has been grounded in the work of communities across the country -- youth who have decided that they want a radio station to talk about the dropout rate in their schools, or farmworkers using their radio stations to fight for rights in the tomato fields. We have been able to get legislators to buck the demands of the big broadcasters through many strategies -- but the best one has been individuals and groups taking the time to speak directly to their legislators about what they need.
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