Creating Genuiune Hope and Public Media's Role

Barack Obama’s historic win as 44th president of the United States has inspired hope in many. I first felt inspired by a presidential campaign in 1988 when Jesse Jackson ran for the Democratic Party presidential nomination. His oft repeated phrase, “Keep hope alive!” still rings in my mind and heart. And I remember when my hopes were dashed after President Clinton broke his 1992 campaign promise to repeal the United States military’s ban on homosexuals.

Hope without action is hopeless. One of President-elect Obama’s messages for each of us is to be involved in the changes we seek. What role can public media play in creating genuine hope?

I see new evidence that this is one of the questions being discussed and acted upon in the realm of public broadcasting where I have worked for the past 17 years. I see a new role for public broadcasting in the creation of genuine hope.

I have been immersed in a new experience for the past 18 months with staff from 11 other public broadcasters in a project known as the Community Engagement Initiative funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Our task is to find new ways to make public television and public radio stations more significant local organizations, important to and deeply involved in the civic life of our communities. We’re being guided by The Harwood Institute for Public Innovation, a nonprofit nonpartisan organization that helps people in communities imagine and act for the public good.

Why public broadcasting?

When President Johnson signed into law the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967, he said:

It will get part of its support from our Government. But it will be carefully guarded from Government or from party control. It will be free, and it will be independent--and it will belong to all of our people…. So today we rededicate a part of the airwaves--which belong to all the people--and we dedicate them for the enlightenment of all the people.

Today, public opinion surveys show that public broadcasting shares a deep trust and goodwill among the public. We are one of the last standing national community organizations to span boundaries created by political affiliation, gender, race, age and other categories and provide an alternative to the disconnected close-knit circles that many Americans have retreated into.

So how can a public broadcaster create genuine hope? By being part of the communities it serves instead of acting apart from those communities. By being more than a broadcaster of one-way information pushed out to the public.

Public television station, KETC in St. Louis, one of the 12 public broadcasters involved in the Community Engagement Initiative, is an early adopter of these practices. When the mortgage crisis hit, St. Louis was disproportionately affected. Immediately, station staff went into the community and held listening sessions at local churches and schools to assess people’s needs. KETC created an advisory committee of 25 trusted community partners and connected these partners and people in need through 2-1-1 Missouri, a fast, free and confidential way to get help 24 hours a day, seven days a week. KETC’s TV programming reflected accurate stories of how people were impacted. 2-1-1 received an additional 8,400 calls as a result of KETC's work on-air, online and in the community. A significant spike in calls was noted during two, hour-long KETC TV specials connecting people to help on the mortgage crisis. Some of the impact of KETC’s work includes an increased understanding by the public of the depth of the mortgage crisis, an increase in the number of people more likely to seek information that could help them, an increase in the number of people likely to share that information with others, and homeowners that managed to avoid foreclosure.

In the case of WILL AM-FM-TV in Urbana, IL where I work, we have begun to expand our role to that of a catalytic organization. By catalytic we mean being an organization that helps engage people in public life, spur discussion on community challenges and marshal a community’s resources to move ahead. We help lay the foundation for community action.

We do this as storytellers, conveners of conscience community dialogues and facilitators of new pathways to each other using face-to-face communication and new media technologies. As conveners we bring people together to access community needs and to review the community needs assessments of organizations that regularly gather this information. As facilitators, we hope to create new pathways to people and organizations working on the same community issue but disconnected from each other. And as storytellers, we use our radio, TV and website to accurately reflect the work of the communities we serve in creating change. And we also help train people to use micro technology to tell their community’s stories and upload those stories to our Website. We believe that all of this together creates genuine hope over time.

We have two methods of measuring our impact. An internal community impact tool staff uses to evaluate our impact in seven key categories and an external significance barometer that community members use to rate our significance as a catalytic organization. Our evaluation methods are on-going and allow us to make changes as needed to improve our performance.

Hope springs from action and it can manifest during an historic presidential election and any time in-between in towns and communities across the country. And there’s a movement in public broadcasting to act together in community as part of community to keep hope alive.