Sound Partners gets mikes out into the community "Being in the presence of somebody who is dying is a holy experience. . . . The first time I put my hand on them, I feel a tremendous amount of energy, just a huge quantity of energy. It's difficult to talk about this experience because we don't have words. Once they have died, once their spirit is gone out of that body, they almost become waxen. It's very dramatic. And it's instantaneous." —Christina Moon, hospice nurse Originally published in Current, May 13, 2002 By Geneva Collins Jacqueline Froelich, news producer at KUAF-FM in Fayetteville, Ark., aired Moon's accounts of comforting the dying as part of a 1998 series, Life & Death Decision Making. Four years later, the project lives on, not only in occasional rebroadcasts but also as a 60-minute audio tape that listeners can buy for a nominal fee (the money goes to a local hospice). "It is timeless, although I didn't design it that way intentionally. But people are still wanting the program to guide them through palliative care and pain management," said Froelich. Like dozens of other local public radio projects that deal with the dramatic stuff of local life—spouse abuse, multiple killings and immigrant isolation—the Arkansas series was made possible by a grant from Sound Partners for Community Health. Sound Partners is operated by the Benton Foundation and funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Though pubcasting airwaves are rife with projects funded by foundations, Sound Partners is notable as a sustained effort to promote local journalism on a broad subject—health—with few strings attached. One unusual string: The broadcasters must collaborate on the project with a nonprofit partner in the community. Producers must address one of five very broad health topics. The grantmakers encourage them to be creative in their interpretation of what constitutes coverage. Grant recipients have aired call-in shows, crafted radio dramas, conducted town hall meetings, and sponsored performance art, in addition to producing the traditional news/feature segments for local cutaways in Morning Edition or All Things Considered. By requiring collaboration with a community nonprofit, the grantmakers aim to get stations out of the breaking-news rut and give them entree to the nonprofits' real-world connections, said Mark Sachs, co-director of Sound Partners along with Beth Mastin. The fresh perspective offered by the nonjournalistic partner allows the station to "take the time to give people the kind of information about health care they wouldn't get ordinarily," said Sachs. "It gives voice to ordinary people, not just experts." Although most of the stations select obvious health care centers for community partners—hospices, medical centers, nursing schools, state health agencies—other partnerships are not so intuitive, such as a county bar association, an art center, a cooperative extension agency. KUAF is one of many Sound Partners grantees that has taken the community partnering concept to heart, said Froelich. Since its first grant, the station has collaborated with a commercial TV station, a mental health care agency and other institutions on programming projects. It received a second grant from Sound Partners in 2000 for a radically different concept—pairing with a local art center to use art therapy as a tool for recovering teenage substance abusers to mentor at-risk fifth-grade schoolchildren. Programming for the project, called Fearless Art, Fearless Choices, included segments covering the mentor training and therapy sessions and a live call-in show hosted by teens, commentaries by teens, and drug prevention PSAs. The mentors also staged performance art at various schools. "I make it completely clear to my project partners that they can in no way influence the program content. They can't review it, edit it or censor it in any way. Otherwise it slips into advocacy journalism," Froelich explained. But the partnership approach is nonetheless enriching because the partners are helpful in "finding sources, providing insight, deep content. It's a wonderful model, really." Latest grant round solicits TV bids Sound Partners' first two grant rounds provided 68 public radio stations with up to $35,000 each to report and conduct outreach efforts on five broad health topics. The third grant round is now under way—recipients will be announced next month—and will for the first time include six public television stations as a pilot project, along with up to 35 radio stations. TV stations will get up to $60,000 apiece. Also new this funding cycle are community grants for the broadcaster's partners and a limited number of grants for partnerships with other media. Here's how some earlier recipients have spent the cash: KVMR-FM, Nevada City, Calif. When Joan Buffington first applied for a Sound Partners grant in 1998, the tiny community radio station didn't even have a news department. The station does now, thanks to the grant and a subsequent one in 2000. Buffington, who has a master's degree in psychological social work and was working part-time as a therapist, became news director. To her, the Sound Partners grants were a terrific opportunity to pull together her health and journalistic backgrounds. The first grant created the Who Cares? Project, which examined welfare reform and spun off a weekly call-in program that is ongoing. The second grant was supposed to focus on issues involving aging and the chronically ill, but when a patient from a local mental institution killed three people in January 2001, KVMR abruptly shifted gears to look at the impact the event had on the tight-knit rural community and on mental health needs in the community. Buffington praised Sachs and Mastin for letting the station change course midway through the grant: "They absolutely trust us to know what's going on in our community." The station, which partnered with a disability advocacy group for both Sound Partners grants, received special recognition from the county board of supervisors for its role in helping to secure $400,000 in additional funding from the state for mental health services in the county. The National Federation of Community Broadcasters also took notice, giving KVMR a Golden Reel Award at its conference in April (page B5). "I believe very much that the nature of community radio is to empower the community to speak for itself. The radio station should not be separate from the community but part of it," said Buffington. KDNA-FM, Granger, Wash. Spanish-language KDNA is trusted by the migrant farm workers in the Yakima Valley as a reliable source of information on health services and other relevant issues, said Amelia Ramon, development specialist and producer for the station. "Sometimes it's difficult to get grants for an educational station. It's hard to tell others what we're doing," said Ramon. "They [Sound Partners] really showed a lot of foresight in recognizing radio as an outreach tool." The station partnered with the Yakima Valley Farm Workers Clinic to stage call-in shows that generated a lot of participation since the format allows for caller anonymity. Because many of the undocumented farm workers are mistrustful of government services, they would frequently show up at the radio station for more information after a segment aired. The station wound up arranging for a food stamp official to set up office in its building once a week. Using a vehicle that would be familiar to listeners, the staff created two-minute soap opera-ish radio novelas to transmit information on topics such as prenatal care and health screenings. They also compiled an audio tape that contained 30 minutes of traditional Mexican popular music on one side and health care information on the other. The tapes were handed out at community events. West Virginia Public Radio, Charleston, W.Va. Susan Leffler, special projects producer for the network, knew that the people most likely to be affected by welfare reform in her small, mostly rural state were not public radio listeners. But the movers, shakers and policy makers who drafted legislation were listening. The 26 three-minute features she did as part of her Sound Partners grant (there were also four hourlong call-in programs) were intended to serve as a bridge between the two groups. Welfare rights advocates credited Leffler's profiles of the working poor, such as the family of nine struggling to live on less than $500 a month, for sparking debate that eventually got the state legislature to reverse a controversial provision in the welfare reform package in 1999, although Leffler is quick to point out that many groups were involved in getting the provision stricken from the books. Grassroots partners such as the Christian Help Center aided Leffler in finding welfare recipients isolated in the mountains. "They're a hard population to get to," she said. "Many people don't have phones. They are not anxious to talk to the media." West Virginia Public Radio does not have beat reporters, only regional ones, so the Sound Partners grant allowed Leffler to focus on an aspect of health coverage that might have otherwise been neglected. WJAB-FM, Normal, Ala. The Alabama A&M University station teamed up with the state cooperative extension system (which operates on the campus) to target victims of domestic violence with its Sound Partners grant. Together they ran workshops, created mall displays, and hosted luncheons to promote dialogue. Elizabeth Sloan-Ragland, g.m. and director of telecommunications, said the interviews with women in abusive relationships were some of the most emotional shows the station has aired. "What I have found most rewarding personally is women coming up to me thanking me for airing the programs and confiding that they had been in an abusive situation and gotten out," she said. "Many times these were the most accomplished women, no one would ever guess this about them, but they would share that with me, and we'd end up in tears." The station continues to work with the cooperative extension agency on other outreach projects, she said. Community in crisis added after Sept. 11 Sound Partners was the brainchild of Sachs, a former staffer at NPR and CPB who now runs an executive coaching consulting firm in Silver Spring, Md., and Vicki Weisfeld, a senior communications officer for the Princeton, N.J.-based Johnson foundation, during a rendezvous at Washington's Union Station. "I was catching a train. We met [at a restaurant in the station], talked for 45 minutes and a project was born," Weisfeld recounted. The Johnson foundation had been providing grants to NPR for years but, sparked by the success of a grant to NPR in which part of the money went to local stations, it was seeking a more grassroots-oriented approach to reach underserved audiences, said Weisfeld. "We thought the local stations had done some interesting projects with small amounts of money." Sachs suggested adding the community partner component, she said. The Benton Foundation was added as fiscal agent for the grants and to provide oversight. "One of our goals is to disseminate lessons learned so that it becomes a replicable model," said Karen Menichelli, executive v.p. of Benton. The Johnson foundation chooses the five grant topics, which may vary slightly from cycle to cycle but are designed to fit in with the foundation's overall mission of improving health care for all Americans. "Youth substance abuse" of the previous grant round is called "new approaches to reducing addiction" in the current one. In the wake of Sept. 11, the topic "strengthening community during difficult times" was added. Weisfeld said the intent was to take the topic beyond just terrorism. "The topics are so broad what we're really asking is for communities to find their own need and make a compelling case for it," said Sound Partners co-director Mastin, who brings outreach and public television experience (she was director of program outreach at WETA, Washington, D.C., in the '80s) to the program. She is excited about the expansion into TV. Unlike radio, many TV stations already have outreach workers on staff. However, she noted, "historically the way outreach has worked in TV is that there is a national production and the national program office puts out collateral materials, makes alliances with national partners and gives out a turnkey kit" to stations. She is curious to see what kind of creative local programming and partnering gets made with the grant money. Grant recipients get technical expertise and attend conferences on collaborating with a partner, especially one that may not understand how the media works or why a radio station news department objects to advocacy. "There are organizational issues, power issues—it's a lot like starting a relationship with a new person," said Sachs. As with personal relationships, the partnering can be difficult but extremely rewarding. Sachs would like to see other foundations cloning the partnering aspect of the project to promote environmental, cultural or other kinds of programming. "We're unaware of any other large-scale effort that uses this orientation," he said.

To Current's home page Outside links: Sound Partners for Community Health, Benton Foundation, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation

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