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| photo credit: Facebook/WBNY 91.3 |
“Living 4 The People,” a radio program that offers a progressive analysis of political issues, airs every Monday, Wednesday and Friday from 9 a.m. to 10 a.m. on 91.3 WBNY-FM.
Hosted by former executive director of the Community Action Organization of Western New York and former executive of Urban Think Tank, L. Nathan Hare, the show’s goal is to spark conversation and engage younger audiences.
“For the college, you want our students to be exposed to as many new ideas and different ways of understanding ideas as possible, and that may not be as easily done in a classroom as we can do on our radio program,” he said.
Hare finds that there are very few radio programs that offer a progressive analysis.
“Most of the time radio programs are either sports or there are programs that are talking from a very right-winged or conservative point of view and very little that talks about things from a progressive point of view,” he said. “I’m always trying to figure out ways that we need to move to secure what seems to be in the best interest of the people as a whole.”
Hare said that people may exercise their rights, but doing so doesn’t necessarily mean that it benefits the community as a whole and that helping the vast majority exercise their rights as well is also crucial.
One new production element of the show is that it can be viewed on Facebook Live.
Willie Hytch, the live streamer technician, said that it helps build the relationship with the host and its audience members.
“James Braun controls the audio board, it goes out live and callers can call in,” Hytch said. “We feed it to Facebook Live so people can comment.”
The show launched a little over two years ago when Braun, the executive producer, approached Hare with the idea after following work done by Amy Goodman, the host of Democracy Now!
“Gregory Harvey is our chief engineer and he set up many new programs that we’re using now, so that a lot of the new production facilities that we have is through him from getting a new budget through USG,” he said.
Just as the pandemic affected everyone else’s everyday lives, it also affected their production set.
“Because the campus itself was closed, we weren’t able to do the production here in the studio,” he said.
As a former member of Community Action Organization, Hare was able to use a facility on Fillmore Avenue as a temporary studio where volunteer staff helped run the program through Clean Feed.
Hare said that most of the audience members who call in tend to be in their 40s to 60s and that the media tends to frame it as if the younger generation is more politically active than it actually is.
“When we talk about how we engage younger people, we need to provide them with our experience and our knowledge of what has taken place before now,” he said.
Hare encourages the older generation and younger generations to work together in proposing solutions to issues we face today.
By doing so, the younger generation can use their skills and energy to create what he described as a “whole new genesis of ways of solving problems” to creating policy change.
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