MPR Community Engagement: Collaboration with BIPOC Community Media and Radio Camps

The events of the past year - from the coronavirus pandemic to the killing of George Floyd and the reckoning that followed to the election and beyond - have highlighted that MPR needs to serve all audiences and not just those people who historically listened to us. As a media organization with a public service mission, we need to reflect the needs, faces and voices of the various communities of our state, and we need to be a resource for people trying to navigate this challenging moment in history.

Currently in Minnesota there are a few dozen BIPOC media organizations that serve Minnesota's BIPOC groups. The two proposed MPR Community Engagement projects are designed to help MPR better serve BIPOC audiences through partnership with some of these organizations while also building their organizational and individual capacity to create high quality audio content and MPR's cultural fluency to serve new audiences authentically.

MPR's Community Engagement projects include:

- Learning Exchange with BIPOC Community Media: MPR will collaborate with BIPOC media groups to exchange best practices and co-create content and co-convene on relevant topics to all Minnesotans.

The Learning exchange will be a partnership between MPR and 8 BIPOC community media groups over two years (4 partnerships each in FY22 and FY23, including 2 from the metro and 2 from Greater Minnesota in each year) that includes a learning exchange and creating original content to be jointly distributed by MPR and the BIPOC community media groups' platforms as relevant, including radio, print and digital.

MPR will dialogue with BIPOC community media groups to identify the media groups that are ready and have the capacity to partner with us on this project. Currently there are 18 active Low Power FM (LPFM) stations, serving mostly communities of color and rural communities. The LPFM stations join dozens of BIPOC media groups, some like the Minnesota Spokesman Recorder that have a longer history in the region than MPR's own five decade history.

This project is an evolution of MPR's two successful Low Power FM and community radio station trainings in FY 2017 and 2020. Our station partners told us they now want a deeper relationship with MPR that includes a true partnership with content creation and learning exchange. The post event surveys indicate that participants believe they also have knowledge and skills around serving BIPOC groups that MPR could learn from.

- Radio Camps: MPR Radio Camp will be a week-long summer media experience for 12 BIPOC high school students each year who are volunteering, working, or being mentored by BIPOC community media groups. The Radio Camps will be implemented in collaboration with ThreeSixty Journalism a program at the University of St. Thomas with a mission to develop BIPOC journalists of color, as well as one community radio station partner. We will also partner with BIPOC Influencers and organizations in the metro and Greater Minnesota to recruit students statewide with a goal of having a mix of students.

The content created by the students will air on MPR and community radio stations and will also appear on mpr.org, as well as the community media platforms of our partner Radio Camp partners, including radio, print and digital.