Annual Membership Meeting Matt Dishman Community Center

Annual Membership Meeting
Matt Dishman Community Center
September 15, 2013

Board members present:

Sue Bartlett
Matthew Bristow
S. W. Conser
Jeff Kipilman
Michael Papadapoulos
Adin Rogovin
Mark Sherman
Timothy Welp

Candidate Forum - Candidates present and participating:

Jen Davis
Ben Hoyne
Ed Kraus
Rebecca Nay
Dennis Nyback
Robert Rogers
Adin Rogovin
Robin Ryan
Joe Uris
Kristin Yount

Election Results: Ballots were counted and verified by the League of Women Voters.

Total ballots received 718
Ballots with errors 20
Total valid ballots 698

Results

Joe Uris 480 Elected to the board
Michael Wells 475 Elected to the board
Jennifer Davis 387 Elected to the board
Adin Rogovin 349 Elected to the board
Robin Ryan 162
Kristin Yount 143
Ed Kraus 135
Rebecca Nay 134
Robert Rogers 133
Delphine Cricenzo 121
Ben Hoyne 111
Rabia Yeaman 106
Dennis Nyback 051

Guest Speakers:
Greg Nibler and Sarah Dylan. They are the organizers behind Funemployment Radio.

funemploymentradio.com

Meet The Current Board: The current board members, pre-election, were introduced and took questions
from the floor.

State of the station address: Delivered by S. W. Conser
Hello, I'm S.W. Conser, President of the Board of the KBOO Foundation.
I would personally like to thank all the Board candidates who've come out today, as well as all
the candidates who couldn't attend but who arranged for surrogate speakers to appear in their
place.

And of course, thank you to all the members of KBOO who have taken time away from your
weekend activities and your families and your gardens to be here today.

To all of you, I'd like to say:
The state of the planet is transitional.
The state of our society is transitional.
The state of broadcast media is transitional.
And the state of the station is transitional.

Forty-five years ago, this broadcast outlet was a do-ocracy, a 24 / 7 Amish-style barn-raising,
dependent for its survival on whoever gave a damn, whoever would come down to spin some
records late at night, to fill out the paperwork, to dump the rainwater out of the rooftop
equipment.

Well, the more things change, the more things stay the same. KBOO in 2013 is still part nonprofit
corporation, part gift economy. The hundreds of people who come through the doors of
20 Southeast Eighth Avenue, with their deep knowledge of the local culture, of international
affairs, of news-gathering, of marketing, of outreach, of finance, the hundreds of people who
give away their expertise for nothing, but not thinking it's for nothing, knowing it's for
something much more than the columns in a spreadsheet.

This is the hidden economy that's so much talked about these days. Look no further. The 45
years of KBOO's history could fill up a shelf of academic studies in any economics department,
any department that cared enough to venture beyond the simple distillation of cooperative
action into raw numbers.

Not to say we don't have the numbers here. In true seat-of-the-pants fashion, the board of
directors, the committees and the staff, have all been staying up late these past several weeks,
converting the adventures of the past year into reports as our fiscal year comes to a close.
It'll be a few more weeks before we have all the final figures, but one pattern is clear. KBOO
Foundation members are loyal, and generous. We don't have any Schnitzers or Knights or
Gateses among our major donors. Most of you wouldn't even need to dig all that deep to be a
major donor to KBOO. But the advantage — and the challenge — that KBOO has over other
non-profit organizations is the level of activism among all our members, the level of
accountability that you all demand of us.

We members of the board are volunteers, like the hundreds of other volunteers that keep the
station humming. We put in our hours (and they've been significant lately), we do a lot of
personal outreach and we sign a few papers, but the direction of the station is not up to the
twelve of us. There's a quote that applies here, one that's sometimes attributed to Gandhi:
“There go my people. I must follow them, for I am their leader.”

On the membership front, we have an incredibly active membership. For over a decade now,
fully ten percent of KBOO listeners are also financial supporters of the station. Dollars raised
per listener remained above $11.00 for the third year in a row, and we estimate that membership
revenue will exceed what's been budgeted by 3.5%.

The Spring 2013 membership drive had the highest average pledge ($87.79) of any drive since
Winter 2011 ($89.79) and second highest since Winter 2009 ($89.99). We processed more
automatic monthly donations and dollars this year, than in any of the past 5 years.
On the downside, the membership count for FY 2013 is projected to be between 4800 and 4900,
a decline of about 6% compared to FY 2012 average membership count. This was the first year
since 2009 that membership losses exceeded those in listenership.

Counting the one-day “flash drive," we've held three membership drives this year. There was
some controversy over the cancellation of this year's Winter drive in favor of summer
fundraising activities which never actually materialized.

Based on our budget figures through August 31 and an estimate of September revenue and
expenses, 2013 revenue will likely be about $100,000 less than 2012. Most notably, the 2013
budgeted Events/Co-sponsorships revenue of $120,000 fell over $100,000 short. By the way,
I'm still talking in fiscal years, so FY 2013 runs from October of 2012 through September of
2013.

These numbers are partly offset by a reduction in expenses of $50,000 over the previous year.
And it is likely that KBOO's net deficit of $50,000 would have been dramatically reduced or
eliminated, had the cancelled fundraising efforts gone forward. According to our Board
Treasurer, "the choice to cancel the Winter Pledge Drive and failure to fulfill the events
activities are the most significant causes of KBOO's poor financial performance in 2013. The
Membership and Development Committees should be addressing how to reverse this in 2014."
After a strong first year in 2012, the Strategic Plan missed a number of its goals in 2013.
Echoing this falloff, our grant funding has been less successful in 2013 than in 2012, but not for
lack of initiative. The Newsti.ps citizen reporting newsfeed project, initiated by our News
Director, was a finalist in the PDX Startup Challenge. We’re looking into another grant, and
talking with the Open Source Lab at Oregon State University about organizing a hackathon to
jumpstart the software component of this KBOO News project.

And although we missed out on a Collins grant to fund digital conversion of our audio archive,
this special project is still a major goal of the Strategic Plan, along with expanded web presence
and establishment of a community media center here at KBOO.

A bright spot in our budget is the huge increase in underwriting, as KBOO reaches out to small
business partners in the community. As of September 9th of this year, our Underwriting
Coordinator has brought in $73,500 in cash and nearly $19,000 in trade, for a grand total of
over $92,000 in signed revenue.

Community outreach efforts across all the departments at KBOO have taken big leaps this year.
We began a statewide partnership with Oregon Community Media, a statewide group of
community, Low Power FM, and other allies in grassroots media making! We spearheaded a
statewide broadcast of the Waterfront Blues Festival, and aired a program in August with
stations from Warm Springs, Ashland, Salem, Bend, Cottage Grove, Shady Cove, and KBOO all
contributing pieces. Using our second KBOO audio stream, we provided very high quality
content of the entire Waterfront Blues Festival to 8 stations statewide. We are looking forward
to continued partnership with OCM.

KBOO hosted students from the Media Institute for Social Change in July, and we released at
45th anniversary 7” record featuring Elizabeth Cotten and our very first Artist in Residence,
Marisa Anderson. Next week, Marisa is leaving on a full US tour to promote her third solo
album, which is getting rave reviews. She'll be back in town in December to perform the
compositions she worked on here at KBOO, including re-examinations and variations on public
domain songs. At the same time, we will begin taking applications for our second Artist in
Residence.

I.T. efforts at the station this year continue to upgrade existing infrastructure and bring us up to
date with our network and PC workstations. This year we are purchasing a new more powerful
WiFi router to provide better Wi-Fi coverage within the building and replacing workstations in
all production studios with much faster and more powerful PCs. Discussion is in progress for a
disaster preparedness strategy that would keep KBOO on the air in the event of a real
emergency. Funding for this disaster preparedness plan may be a grant writing opportunity.
Meanwhile, a new translator is in place in Corvallis, and the KBOO Station License Renewal
process is in progress and on track with the FCC timeline.

Thanks in part to the training of volunteers by the Engineering Department, KBOO's schedule
of live remote broadcasts has increased, and the audio quality has been exceptional. This past
year, we covered the Illahee Lecture series, the Waterfront Blues Festival, Pickathon, Good in
the Hood, Indigenous Experience Northwest, Keep Alive the Dream, and Marylhurst
University’s American Voices Stravinsky Showcase.

We hosted special programs, including the Melting Pot Silent Dance Parties, International
Women's Day, WFMU's Hurricane Sandy coverage, the 50th Anniversary of March on
Washington, the 65th anniversary of Vanport Floods, and Tune In Turn On Remember - a
monthly program showcasing KBOO’s 45 years.

And what about our regular programming? Our On-Air Programmer contract has been revised,
and our Programming Director and Station Manager have met with all the programmers. Instudio
music performances are on the rise, and thanks to the hard work of our Investigative
Reporting Teams, local news at KBOO has been expanding, occasionally to a full hour in the
evenings.

The long and the short of it is, KBOO is the one media outlet left in town where people can still
walk in the door and take the advice of Jello Biafra: Don't hate the media, become the media.
I can tell that many of you, like me, grew up on radio, way back in the 20th century when
content was local, and not just on the left end of the dial. Local D.J.s on the commercial
stations played local artists, announced local events, and took calls from local listeners.
And if you're of the generation that came of age in the 21st century, you could be forgiven if the
idea of freeform radio is an alien concept to you. Public stations have followed in the footsteps
of commercial stations, replacing innovative local shows with syndicated content engineered to
appeal to the broadest possible audience.

Last month, I was saddened to hear of the death of Marian McPartland. Her long-running show,
Piano Jazz, was the last of the great hybrid shows on the radio dial, shows that mixed up music
with conversation. The programming honchos at all the major stations put up with Marian's
funky format, because she'd been building up a loyal fan base for thirty-odd years, but they
were just as happy when it went away, because it didn't fit into their pigeonholes of what a
program should be. Music. Talk. Comedy. Drama.

But the glory days of radio are not forgotten. They're not even gone. Hundreds of thousands of
radio listeners across the country tune in on the web to far-away community stations like
WFMU in New Jersey and WWOZ in New Orleans, because there's nothing like it in their
town. Or in their city. My hometown of Chicago, population two point seven million, doesn't
have a community station.

Meanwhile, tens of thousands of people are taking matters into their own hands, and starting
internet radio stations, podcasts, low-power FM outlets.

So there's a great hunger out there for what KBOO's got: experimental music, knowledgeable
hosts from around the world, news that flies under the radar of the major media for weeks or
months or years — and of course that ineffable Portland glow. So, how to connect A with B, a
hungry audience with their true media home? Maybe not with the broadest or straightest path,
so we need to keep charting new courses. It's ironic, but one of the hazards that radical
institutions are prone to, is a reliance on the way that things have always been done.

One of my memories from my scouting days, long long ago, was of canoeing along remote
lakes in northern Wisconsin, past old docks and piers with their ramshackle taverns. And that's
where I'd see these old beer signs. A lot of those signs were for one particular "dying brand."
There was a beer back then, popular in those parts with the old guys who fished for crappie and
pike. Nobody under the age of fifty would touch the stuff, though. But there it was, advertised
on those creaky, faded signs: Pabst Blue Ribbon.

So, how did Pabst Blue Ribbon go from the dying brand served in backwoods taverns to the
first choice of ironic scenesters in the new millennium? Credit it to a brilliant marketing
campaign, maybe, or to dumb luck, or to a throwaway line of dialogue in David Lynch's Blue
Velvet.

The more interesting question to me is: How did the city of Portland go from a cultural
backwater 45 years ago, to the darling of New York Times travel writers, fashionistas,
filmmakers, comics artists, techies, brewmasters, vintners, and foodies? Gee, I don't know —
anybody got any ideas?

Utah Phillips used to say that you could tell the measure of a town by whether it had a strong
community radio station. A place where traveling musicians could play a set and promote their
shows, where native writers could tell their stories, and up-and-coming journalists could hone
their craft.

How many local authors gave their first reading on KBOO? How many cultural venues survive
and even thrive in this town thanks to the Radiozine, the community calendar, the late-night
freeform programming and our live remotes? And what about the festivals that bring in music
fans from around the world? Can we start with the Waterfront Blues Fest, NoFest, Pickathon —
all started and nurtured by KBOO.

So what are the next steps for the station? There are as many opinions as there are people in
this room, and in true KBOO fashion, we'll be working through each and every one of them
over the next year, sometimes smoothly, sometimes intensely. This is still a place where the
people make the decisions about how to best represent their community, without the veto power
of outside experts.

But to me, a big step will be to remind the political leaders, the promoters, the literary and
artistic and musical impresarios who take credit for Portland's livability, its cachet, its quirkiness
and queerness, remind those people where the seeds were sown for the harvest that they now
enjoy. The address is 20 Southeast Eighth Avenue.

Every time somebody talks to you about the amazing participatory vibe that sets Portland apart,
don't let them forget who kept that spirit alive for 45 years, through efforts by moneyed interests
to turn our region into a landscape of eight-lane highways and toxic landfills, clearcut forests
and privatized beaches.

Personally, I don't think KBOO needs a Madison Avenue agency or a fictional character like
Dennis Hopper's Frank Booth to stir up hipster cred on our behalf, but there's no sin in
demanding credit where credit's due. If a barely-drinkable product like Pabst Blue Ribbon can
make the demographic leap from crusty old fishermen to the fashion elite, what are the
possibilities for a resource like KBOO?

In this age of crowd-sourcing, there's a world of techniques to be experimented with, new
options to be studied, new connections to be made outside these doors.

The state of the station is fraught with hazard.
The state of the station is rich with opportunity.

As it was in 1968. As it was in 1980. As it was in 1991. As it was in 2001.
As it is in 2013.

It's all up to you. It's always been up to each and every one of you.
Thank you for reminding us of that.

The foregoing minutes were submitted by the secretary on Oct 2, 2013
Mark Sherman
Secretary