SFU’s campus and community radio station has recently been awarded a grant of $49,820 by the Canadian Radio Fund of Canada (CRFC) for an upcoming project titled “Making Time for Radio.”

This is the largest grant to be awarded in the station’s history. CJSF station manager Magnus Thyvold explained that accessible grant funding opportunities for community and campus radio stations were unheard of until around seven years ago, when the CRFC was established.

CRFC will provide CJSF with 90 per cent of the funds upfront, and the remaining 10 per cent following the completion of a final report at the end of the one-year grant period.

Approximately $35,000 will go towards funding five part-time spoken word producer positions — a significant addition for an organization run by a small staff and over 150 volunteers. For the radio-illiterate, spoken word refers to any talk-oriented programing.

The remainder of the grant will go towards the production of over eight hours of radio documentaries, skill training sessions for the new hires, volunteers, and prospective contributors, and a contingency travel budget.

Thyvold explained, “The reason [the project] is targeted at spoken word or talk programing is because that kind of programing is a lot more challenging to do than, say, a music program where you’re playing music and talking about the artists. [. . .] Doing public affairs-type programming, interview-based programing, or even documentary programing is much more involved.”

The new positions will also help with the timeliness of the news programs produced by CJSF. “There’s a lot of things you can do on the radio — particularly in terms of talk-oriented programing — that is really difficult to achieve just with volunteers,” said Thyvold. “It would be nice to make things more immediate.”

Each part time position will average to seven hours of work per week, at a wage designed to accommodate students’ busy schedules. “The idea of the project is to create a situation where people can engage in some of those more ambitious types of programming in a way that’s practical and feasible within [their] other life commitments,” said Thyvold.

“Instead of having a job at a restaurant or a shop or something like that as your part-time position that you’re doing in addition to school, there would be this position at the radio station that could be your part-time job. You could commit that time to making radio and not [have to] squeeze it in amongst everything else you’ve got going on.”

Eight thousand dollars will be put towards funding 16 radio documentaries — time-consuming projects that the station isn’t able to produce often, due to a lack of resources. There will be four separate funding calls for documentary proposals of varying lengths.

The first two rounds, beginning in July, will select eight 15-minute documentaries, each of which will receive funding of $250. The third round will select four 30-minute documentaries to receive $500 each, and next spring four 60-minute segments will receive $1,000 each for production.

Thyvold noted that they may be looking into some additional fundraising to increase the funding for the individual documentaries.

Toward the end of the project, CJSF hopes to host a radio festival in partnership with some of the local campus and community radio stations, to showcase the 16 documentaries they produce over the next year.