About Radio Volta

Radio Volta, the audio working group of the Philadelphia IMC, is an outgrowth of the webcast team that broadcasted over the "Internet waves" during the 2000 Republican National Convention. Named after Philadelphia anarchist Voltairine de Cleyre, we are an independent community-based collective of creative individuals, committed to airing challenging and nontraditional cultural, educational and news content that will raise awareness and encourage activism around pivotal social and economic justice issues. Pivotal to our mission is a desire to redefine what "news" is in people's daily lives. Rather than disempowering political performances, news should be of the protests and the struggles that our neighborhoods are engaged in on a day-to-day, month-to-month basis. Towards this end, covering protests and featuring the work of community organizations will make up a major chunk of our programming time in the future. This is a need that is particularly pronounced in Philadelphia--grassroots politics is not considered news to the editorial board of the Philadelphia Inquirer unless there is some sort of scandal. When one group asked why this was, they were told that the Inquirer did not cover "staged political events."

Webcasting offers a chance to circumvent the restrictions placed on public dissemination of ideas by the corporate media. Already the news programs created by some IMCs are being picked up by community radio stations across the country, challenging the stranglehold that corporate and NPR news has on the nation, and even challenging the formulaic tendences we are observing in Pacifica's coverage. In order to continue this movement, we need to empower more groups like ours -- starting from a grassroots, community-based perspective, but empowered by our participation in a larger anti-corporate movement to democratize the media. We are doing this not just as an exercise in our own powers of expression, but explicitly because we want to forge this ground.

News, outreach and fundraising committees are starting to coalesce and our first benefit concert is planned for mid-February, featuring spoken word and music by local bands. We hope that once we raise some funds, we can return borrowed equipment and purchase our own.

Our studio is located in a multi-racial, multi-income neighborhood that is also home to a vibrant and extended anarchist community, the members of which work to incorporate anti-oppression work into every corner of their lives. Radio Volta, made up of Philadelphians from all sorts of lifestyles and ages, is lucky to be situated in this environment, and we are committed to taking full advantage of it. Outreach and collaboration will be a continual and integral part of our efforts. At this point, Radio Volta is about 80% white, about 70% poor, half men and half women, with a variety of sexual lifestyles and a unanimous consensus of people's rights to choose their own path. We have no people with disabilities working with us yet and we are limited at this point, with several exceptions, to 20- and 30-somethingers. Embedded in this project is a hope to reach beyond the unfortunately de-facto in-group of white, middle-class activists that has controlled most of the IMCs.

We already have personal connections and political alliances with many groups that serve poor people and people of color communities in this city (such as ACT UP Philadelphia, the Kensington Welfare Rights Union, and the Pennsylvania Abolitionists), with groups that serve children and families (e.g. the Pentridge Children's Garden), with groups that serve women and older pople (e.g. the Wise Woman Center). Our long- term vision is to flesh these contacts out into powerful and grassroots programming that redefines "news" to be literally how we are working together as a community - globally and locally - to address systemic problems.