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How to join the crew
WDFH is powered by volunteers and is always looking for new people who want to join us in our work to advance our mission. As you will see by checking out WDFH's staff, our members range from professionals with decades of experience to people getting their very first taste of radio at WDFH. The first step is to read our mission, below. Then you should read through specific pages on this site, listed below, so you can get more acquainted with WDFH. The mission of WDFH is to help activate and enrich community in an area underserved by local broadcast media. We are working to do this by educating and enlightening our listeners through in-depth issues-oriented programming; bridging gaps in our community by giving voice to populations and perspectives that are underrepresented in mainstream media; providing a forum for local culture; presenting a wide variety of music in a thoughtful and artistically respectful manner; connecting local nonprofit organizations in our region with each other and with the public; and empowering community volunteers to become active media participants rather than just passive media consumers. WDFH's volunteers thoroughly embrace this mission. We are seriously committed to local news and public affairs and to social justice issues, and we are actively seeking volunteers to work in these areas. We recently launched a program about environmental sustainability; current new initiatives include programs to give voice to disenfranchised minority groups, such as LGBT youth. Our music programming includes rock, folk, blues, and jazz in a freeform mix. Prospective music program hosts must have substantial familiarity with these genres. Because we strive to provide an alternative to mainstream media, we do not play pop or other types of music that are already played on commercial radio stations. We are, and must be, very tightly focused on specified target areas of our mission: developing new public affairs programs, increasing our funding base, and developing our audience and volunteer staff. As a secondary focus, we are training people to work on the air as music hosts. Not everyone is required to be on the air, but everyone who does on-air work is required to participate in the targeted behind the scenes areas as well. Because of our tight focus, we are open to new programming ideas that fit into our mission; we can't accommodate program proposals that don't fit into the mission. If you are the next hot shock jock or want to do programming similar to what might be heard in the mainstream media, WDFH is almost certainly not going to be a good fit with your interests. But if working to advance our community service mission resonates strongly within you, please consider joining our growing group of volunteers. The pages you should read are:
If you live within commuting distance of our new studio in Yonkers and are interested in the kind of mission-driven radio we do, please send us a plain text e-mail (no attachments) and type "join the staff" in the subject area. The address is:
As an anti-spam measure, the address is not clickable, so please type it manually into the address line of your e-mail. Thanks! OK — you've read these pages and you're interested. What do people actually do at WDFH? As mentioned, with the long awaited relocation of our studio now complete, we are focusing in the following three areas: news and public affairs, fundraising, and promotion. We are working to bring more music hosts onto the air, but as noted above, this is a secondary focus at this time.
As we settle into our new facility and start to put the station on more solid financial ground, we will start work in other areas, including:
REQUIREMENTS FOR ALL POSITIONS Basic qualifications:
The Fine Print: WDFH is a non-profit, volunteer-operated business, but it is a business and it must run like one. So: all WDFH volunteers must be willing to make a commitment to WDFH that is "job level" in its seriousness — the kind of commitment under which you tell your friends "Sorry, I can't go" if they invite you to a party at a time when you have a station work shift. In terms of the number of hours, we obviously don't expect anything like 40 hours per week. People working in most departments put in a weekly minimum amount of four hours at the station, though more time is always welcome, and in some cases people volunteer to put in far more than the minimum. All on-air people are required to work on a regularly and ongoing basis in other areas of the station. All on-air positions require minimum one year commitment following completion of our training program. The Fun Stuff With all that serious stuff said, we should also tell you about the good things that come from working here. WDFH is a fun and challenging place to work. We are building a community, and it's exciting to be part of the creative team that is doing that. Rather than sitting on the sidelines and merely being consumers of the media, we get satisfaction in giving back to our communities. We become active citizens contributing our time, energy, and talents to this interesting, alternative, and often quirky out-of-the-mainstream media outlet, and raising our listeners' — and our own — awareness of social, political, and cultural issues along the way. Though we have a minimum one year commitment for on-air staff, the reality is that people often stay much longer. Many of our staff members have been around for five years or more, and some even longer than that. We have an exciting, creative work environment at WDFH, with interesting, talented, and dedicated people. If becoming part of the WDFH community strikes a chord in you, we hope you'll consider joining us.
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