KUAW gets closer to making low-wattage, high-impact community radio a reality

To get to the green-walled studios of KUAW radio, you start at downtown’s southern tip and proceed east — away from where you see joggers and streetcars, past the gin joints of Martini Corner, the pork tenderloins of Kitty’s and the incense clouds of the Desert Wisdom Bookstore. You’re on 31st Street, and you’re still traveling east, past the Bluford Library and FootAction, past Woody’s Happy Foods grocery store, past the misleadingly named Central Park.

Keep going until you find yourself in an area surrounded by churches and body shops, mechanics of the soul and the chassis. At last, you hang a right on Cypress. When you see a sprawling yellow-stone castle of a former school building, you’re there.

This once was the Milton Moore elementary building, now home to the W.E.B. DuBois Learning Center, a STEM oasis on KC’s East Side. No longer teeming with yesteryear’s kids, toting books and pencils, it remains at least well occupied with young people learning robotics, programming and algorithms. And it’s also home to a burgeoning radio station that wants to give a voice to this vital but often unheard part of Kansas City.

It’s here on an early February afternoon that Lewis George Walker, co-founder and chief raconteur of the station — KUAW (for Knowledge, Understanding and Wisdom) LPFM (low-power frequency modulation) — kicks off a crowdfunding campaign with a daylong marathon of station tours and online broadcasting over a digital stream at kuaw.org. Walker, who is also the president of Black Family Technology Awareness Association, is on fire.

“We’re going to have shows about LEGO Robotics and coding!” he says. “We’re gonna be helping teens learn to make music! We’re gonna make neighborhoods, schools and churches hear about what each other are doing! We’re gonna have two or three neighborhood associations and churches in here a week!”

Standing behind Walker in the avocado-colored studio is his wife, Mildred Walker, who is clutching headphones to her ears. Across from him is Front Porch Alliance program manager Aimee Alderman, who can’t get a word in edgewise.

“This is co-MYOON-ity radio!” he says.

Walker has reason to sound excited. If the crowdfunding campaign reaches its $1,963 goal by the end of this month, his barrel-chested holler will cross over to the terrestrial dial at 98.5, just a few clicks left of Johnny Dare and T-Bone in the morning.

At the end of 2013, the FCC opened up a passel of new FM frequencies to licensed nonprofits who wanted to create 100-watt stations to broadcast community-oriented programming. In line locally was Leon Dixon Jr., East Side community pillar and co-founder of the DuBois Center. A computational scientist and mathematician but not much of a radio guy, Dixon turned to his friend Walker for help.

“I’m the type of person that will take on a challenge, sometimes to my detriment,” Walker tells The Pitch, “but I’ll go with it and figure it out. It’s like Les Brown says: ‘Leap and grow your wings on the way down.’ ”

Learning to fly will take more than a couple grand. But Walker has it mostly figured out. The $1,963 figure needed by February 29 is the 10 percent KUAW must raise for itself in order to qualify for a matching grant of $19,630 from the Community Capital Fund. (Those who want to donate can find the campaign at kuaw.tilt.com.) The money, Walker says, will be used to buy all the gear needed to crush it like the pros: transmitters, an antenna, a tower, cable, installation fees, office equipment and training material for the all-volunteer staff. The FCC construction license is already in hand. To get the tower erected on the DuBois roof, Walker got help from the cell-tower firm SSC Engineering, which sent some men out to survey, make architectural drawings and help apply for city permits.

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Once the funds are set, Walker will be able to fill the airwaves with knowledge, understanding and wisdom over a roughly 3-mile radius, an area bordered by Blue Ridge Boulevard in the east, Southwest Trafficway in the west, Front Street up north and 63rd Street out south. By typical broadcast measurements, that is indeed low power, but the sounds will still reach a good chunk of urban KCMO. Walker estimates his potential audience at 40,000 households and 111,000 listeners. Get even a modest percentage of that audience talking, and who knows what might happen.

“A lot of people in the eastern part of Kansas City, and all the way to Blue Ridge, a lot of them feel they’re not being heard,” Walker says.

Another aspiring Kansas City low-power station agrees that radio gives a boost to marginalized voices.

“I’m really excited because I think this is one of the only chances that Kansas City has media-wise to be an open platform,” says Gunard Polite, founder of One Kansas City Radio. “All the other channels, be it TV or print, aren’t open to new voices. So we’re really excited about getting the opportunity to showcase local ethnic artists.”

Polite (and yes, that’s his real name) has been streaming a mix of national and local music with a focus on Spanish and hip-hop sounds since February 2015. Having also obtained an FCC license in this recent round to transmit at 100.1 FM, Polite hopes to raise the funds needed to go terrestrial by the end of this year.

Of course, either station could stream for far less money, but online radio is a crowded market, and both Polite and Walker want to reach people who don’t have the Internet at home.

“We want the African-American community to be involved and not miss out on this new means of communication that’s coming about,” Walker says. “A tool to improve your standard of living is this broadband Internet.”

Walker envisions a station where the same kids who tune in online will also provide some of the programming. Using New York public radio station WNYC’s Radio Rookies program as a model, Walker wants to train area teens in radio production so that older folks in the community can listen at home to news from area schools — basketball at Central, debate at Lincoln Prep and beyond.

“We got some kids that have done three shows already,” Walker says, “They talked about school lunches, interracial dating — these were students that came up with their own stories.”

Walker calls it “kitchen-table radio,” and so far there’s about nine hours’ worth of it on KUAW each week. That includes the BFTAA show hosted by the man himself at 5 p.m. each Monday, after which comes Cascade Media’s local arts, entertainment and sports show (hosted by Serenity). Then there’s
NSBEpreneur, a business-owner interview show by the National Society of Black Engineers. Tuesday evenings brings Black Matters, with Lamin Reffell; In the Know, with Charis Newsome; and the one-two punch of What’s Up, with Brittany and Jordan, and KC Teen Scene, with Dee Jackson.

To fill out the rest of the week, Walker is working with a couple of area veteran broadcasters to raise an army of teen and adult volunteers. This, he hopes, will lead to funding from underwriters to support a paid staff.

“We’ve got a long way to go in getting our education together,” Walker admits. “But we want to build it and make it good, not struggling along and half there. We want it to be a real station.”