Gleixner notes that although this schedule "looks competitive," in fact, WVTF "wants to work with WCVE to enhance public radio" in the region. He urges Richmonders to continue to make donations to WCVE.
WVTF, which is affiliated with Virginia Tech, purchased the 92.5 FM frequency from a religious radio company in April 2009, but it needed a Richmond tower to bounce off the repeater signal from Charlottesville. It now shares a site on the Clear Channel tower on Basie Road with a radio station from Liberty University. Gleixner notes that WVTF has a couple of kinks to work out with the signal — once in a while, Washington, D.C.-based WAMU bleeds through — but he expects it to be stabilized by the end of next week.
I've got a call in to WCVE president and CEO Curtis Monk to discuss WVTF's entry into the market, and I'll update this post when I hear back from him.
UPDATE: I spoke with Curtis Monk this afternoon. He says that WCVE was aware of WVTF's entrance into the Richmond radio market, although not the specific timing. As for the programming overlaps between RADIO IQ and WCVE's high-def station, he notes, "They take what we have available [and] make it available to a different group of people." At WCVE, however, "we're more focused on doing what we do well." That means giving listeners more value in local news content, Monk says.
When asked if he feels WVTF is intruding on WCVE's territory, Monk demurred: "I can't speak for what WVTF is trying to do." Monk then asked if my listening habits would be affected by RADIO IQ; I said yes, I'd probably listen to Diane Rehm's show, which I listened to regularly when I lived in Northern Virginia and Charlottesville. Ever the public-radio cheerleader, he told me it's good for local listeners to have such options.
Schools spokeswoman Felicia Cosby says a press conference to announce the superintendent’s plan is scheduled for Wednesday at 10:30 a.m. Dr. Yvonne Brandon has been making calls to School Board members to garner support for the proposal, but one board member who got the call on Monday says the only problem she has with Brandon's request is that it took her this long.
Gray says she researched the alarm system after the death of Andrew Joseph Johnson last year, which was not school-system-related. "It's something I've been asking about since that child died in a van last summer," a frustrated Gray says, referring to the 13-month-old Johnson, who was left aboard a Yellow Brick Road Daycare and Learning Center transport van for seven hours.
The alarm system is designed to activate each time the bus is turned off, requiring the driver to walk to the back of the bus to manually deactivate the alarm. That walk gives the driver an opportunity to check the seats. The system is common on newer school buses, and it is already in place on a number of Richmond buses, Cosby says, though she was unable to say how many buses already have the system.
"The younger kids are the ones who don't know to say something" when they're left, says Gray, who has asked the question at "two or three" meetings since Johnson's death last year.
Brandon told Gray that the cost to install the system in all buses that currently don't have it will cost approximately $30,000. Cosby estimated that approximately 180 buses lack the alarm system.
Less than a quarter of Henrico Public Schools' 450-bus fleet is equipped with the alarm system, schools spokesman Mychael Dickerson says, though as new buses come on line, they're being purchased with the equipment.
"They haven't talked about retrofitting the other buses," Dickerson says, rather drivers are required to do a visual inspection of the bus before they debark. "That's the transportation department's policy." A Chesterfield spokesman says all of its buses that are currently in use are equipped with the alarms.
Until April 22.
That Thursday morning, I started my day with a 7 a.m. breakfast at a homeless shelter, joined by 13 others from the community — all part of the daylong event Walking in Their Shoes. Hosted by Homeward, an organization that works to prevent homelessness and educate the community about the problem, the event was taking place for the second time, with the goal of giving members of the community insight into the lives of Richmond’s homeless.
As I sipped my coffee, Homeward executive director Kelly King Horne informed us that on any given day, there are 1,012 homeless people in our area (down 12 percent from last year). She added that "131 children will sleep in shelters tonight.” The thought of more than 100 children having to use shelters that very night quickly engaged me.
To make it more personal, we were each handed a packet that contained an alias and a personal history we had to adopt throughout the day as we accomplished a serious of missions in groups of three. My name? Monika Smith. My mission? To find financial help for housing, then furniture for me and my middle-school-aged daughter; we had been evicted from our apartment off of Chamberlayne Avenue and were currently living at a shelter on East Main Street.
To truly play the part, we had to empty our pockets of everything but our driver’s license (which I ended up forgetfully leaving behind), one-way bus fare, our cell phones (as a safety precaution) and $5 in emergency cash. Then we hit the streets.
Navigating the System
Traversing the city with my two teammates, an enthusiastic youth pastor from St. Paul’s Episcopal Church and a VCU psychology senior seeking a bit of extra credit, we found ourselves seated on a crate-style sofa in the main office of HomeAgain. The shelter was surprisingly homey — though I still found it slightly distressing to think of the adorable children waving and making faces at us through the window having to sleep there.
The exercise started to hit a little deeper as I answered a series of personal questions about Monika Smith. On the practical side, things looked good — my income as a fast-food employee made me eligible for St. Joseph’s Villa’s Flagler program. If I chose to apply and was accepted, I would be assigned a staff member to assist me in finding housing, supplying funds for after-school care for my daughter, sticking to a budget and providing me with free clothing as often as needed. The federally funded program invloves a two-year commitment on both sides. “Our goal is to break the patterns … so you will never be homeless again,” the case manager explained.
During the conversation, it became clear to me that if I was ever truly in that position — with no family or network in the area — I’m not sure I would know how to even begin to navigate the system to find out about Flagler. Should I head to social services or visit a church like St. Paul’s and talk with their social worker? Or should I start at a homeless shelter? And even if I had the personal gumption to do so, would I have enough emotional resilience to answer intensely personal questions?
Free Lunch, New Friends at St. Paul’s
At lunchtime, my counterparts and I hurried to St. Paul’s Episcopal Church (we were told that if you don’t get there by 11:30 a.m., you are often too late) and waited in a long line of hungry men and women. Once inside, I was given a ticket with a number and a small bag of chips, which I nibbled on as I made a few new friends.
Chuck was one of the first. Dressed in a white shirt layered with a jacket, he said he’d been grabbing lunch at St. Paul’s for about three months. He held up a pretty impressive airplane that he’d crafted out of recycled Coca-Cola cans and ran his finger through the plane's propellers, which spun smoothly. He said he’d been making them since he was a young boy and could craft them in about 30 minutes with just staples, cardboard and scissors.
Chuck and I became fast friends — right before I left, he said to me with a grin, “Bethany, I’ll tell you what to do. You leave your boyfriend — you leave your husband, and in 20 years, I’ll support ya!” I laughingly agreed, to which he responded: “It will take me 20 years to save enough money to support a woman like you!” I had tried to dress appropriately as to the event, but I realized that my black flats and cardigan somehow must have given away my suburban roots.
Once our numbers were called and I was munching on chicken, mashed potatoes, gravy and salad, a friendly fellow diner told me that St. Paul’s Thursday lunches are by far the best free meals offered in the city.
To Commerce Road and Back
The afternoon consisted of a trek to Commerce Road and the Caritas Furniture Bank to inquire about the program. (Our bus fare got us partway there; we hoofed it the rest of the way.) The furniture bank is incredibly organized; the mammoth space is filled with everything a home could need — electronics, beds, mattresses, sofas, dishes and more. More impressive to me was that it all began with one woman — out of her garage — just five years ago. The furniture is offered to those in need for free, and about 14 families per week are serviced there.
The trek back to St. Paul’s on foot was about two and a half miles, and it left me with the thought of how something like transportation can be a huge obstacle — and how intensely my feet were killing me.
In a moderated panel discussion that wrapped up the event, one woman’s insight was along the same lines: “If you cannot get there, it’s like that service does not exist to you,” she said.
I left with two thoughts: First, that there are an incredible number of resources for the homeless in our area, from Goodwill Employment Services, which offers daily sessions for free to those without jobs, to free lunches and a variety of financial-assistance programs. However, in spite of that, it truly is a complicated task to navigate the system, and there are often multiple steps and days or weeks of waiting to find a place to stay or to get into the appropriate program.
Now when I pass the homeless couple on my way to work, I think of my day with Homeward and know where to point them if asked for help.
“Does a simulation make a difference?” one person asked as we left, before adding: “It already is.”
WTVR filed its own report on Walking in Their Shoes. The video is embedded below.
How do they do it?
And what do they gain by controlling that flow of information?
These questions came to mind earlier today when I dropped in on the “Summit on New Media + Change in Richmond,” a forum hosted by ConnectNetwork, The Community Foundation, the Knight Foundation and Virginia Commonwealth University.
Thanks to deadline duties here at Richmond magazine, I walked in late but just in time to catch a “report-out” of the new-media discussions happening around the room.
Fifty or more people had each been talking about “how citizens can better connect with each other around issues they care about” and how people in our region could help create that kind of informed community.
One would have to have his head in the sand to say it’s not already happening here, on some level: Several times, in fact, this magazine has thrown props to the granddaddy of local community-news blogs, John Murden (who was in the room today).
With a tip of the hat to John, it seems that an informed community is easy to foster: It just takes a guy with a laptop, some Web savvy and a sense of community engagement, right?
But a key topic of the forum was the idea of access: You and I are sharing this moment here because computer access and some basic Web literacy are a given in our lives.
For a lot of Richmonders, especially folks below the poverty line, this is not the case.
The new-media summit addressed this reality by brainstorming ways to build a better technology infrastructure — more computers, more Web connections — in public spaces and in low-income households where bread comes before bandwidth. Do we use public-transit kiosks and buses as Wi-Fi hotspots? Can nonprofit groups and corporate-giving programs equip low-income households with recycled machines and the necessary software?
Just last week, in fact, the city of Richmond announced in a news release that it’s applying for the Google Fiber for Communities Project, “an experiment to build an ultra-high speed broadband network that will deliver Internet speeds more than 100 times faster than what most Americans have access to today. The planned network will offer speeds over one gigabit per second in fiber-to-the-home connections. Google plans to offer service at a competitive price and an open network.”
The city’s asking for your help, too: “One of the deciding factors in Google’s decision will be community support, and it is imperative that we enlist everyone we can to join our application effort. Residents can join us on our social media sites and show Google that Richmond is the city that will embrace their project and help make it a success.”
If you want to heed the call, show it through the campaign’s Facebook page, its Twitter feed or through gigarva.com.
But, as today’s summit made clear, there are “low-tech” channels that can inform, too — coffeehouse town meetings designed to collect special-interest groups and constituencies who can’t or won’t use new media as their primary source of community information.
Among these dozens of people gathered in North Side today, there seemed to be no shortage of worthy ideas and true civic commitment.
Worthy ideas, however, can’t thrive without some sense of hierarchy or some sort of gatekeeper, whether public, nonprofit or profit-driven. Could something like the Rural Electrification Program have flourished simply as a viral idea under nonprofit guidance?
In my mind, there is a clear parallel between the two — rural electrification and the democratization of new media. Our challenge in the ’30s was to cover a geographic divide; today, it’s such a socioeconomic gap that the “outsider” to Web access could be your neighbor.
One tabletop group including Buttermilk & Molasses blogger John Sarvay offered some worthy suggestions in this direction: Let’s task our local universities and/or a regional partnership to research the gaps in our new-media landscape; let’s ask people about the issues that concern them most and use that to inform those in leadership and decision-making roles around the region, rather than the other way around.
It’s that sometimes-scary gray area that makes the age of new media seem so promising yet so complex: Now, we have the ability at any given moment to turn the gatekeeping process upside-down.
