NFCB Profile Sowing Seeds: Llu Mulvaney-Stanak, WGDR/WGDH Station Manager
National Federation for Community Broadcasters (NFCB) is committed to enhancing collective impact in the field of community media and leading initiatives that contribute to innovation in public media’s service. NFCB provides customized services that optimize organizational capacity and help stations navigate change.
Interviewed by Lisa Kettyle, NFCB Program Director. Interview edited for brevity.
Lisa: How long have you been working in community radio?
Llu: Between work, volunteering and music shows, almost 30 years now. It's only just recently with the launch of Central Vermont Community Radio that I actually made a job of it. I've been working with CVCR for about two years now.
Lisa: What brought you to WGDR?
Llu: It literally took a pandemic to have it all lineup. WGDR, which is the main station of central Vermont, was where I got my start when I was 13 doing community radio. It was my local community radio station. It was still very much a Goddard College station back then in the 90s. I know lots of angsty high school students find the thing that feels like it saves them from the horrors of the high school experience, but frankly, WGDR was what was my saving hobby project. It lit the fire for me – like, radio is kind of the coolest thing ever. Why isn't everybody doing this? 10 years ago, when I was at a point in my career trying to figure out, "Okay, what's next?" I made a list of the jobs in Vermont that I would want to do one day. In Vermont, because we're so small, people rarely leave great jobs. I felt it will probably never happen, but on that list, the very first job that I listed was GM of WGDR.
Goddard had started to decide, between the pandemic and losing a CPB grant, they just could not financially sustain WGDR anymore. Also, ten years ago they had taken on a second station – WGDH. The combination of running those stations and the expenses of it, they just couldn't sustain it. About two and a half years ago, the small group of the founding board got together and said, "Okay, we’ve got to figure this out – we’ll become a nonprofit and keep this going." I had heard about it through the small Vermont grapevine. I reached out and said, "Hey, I actually just built a low-power community radio station in Burlington, and it took us eight years, we learned a lot along the way, I'd love to offer up some coaching or advice totally for free to help you guys make this happen." The board took me up on it. Through that process, they quickly realized that they wouldn’t be able to pull this off by themselves without some deeper help with fundraising. That's the first thing I did for them. It was a labor of love. I knew this was what had to happen at that point to make it possible. By the fall of last year, we had raised enough money to make the transition and make it to the end of the year. The board further realized they actually needed a station manager. WGDR had, at its height, eight staff members, half of them full-time, half of them part-time, and by the time the ownership transition happened, they had two full-time staff. Going from that to zero [staff] and volunteer-based was a very, very bumpy road. They asked me if I would come on as a part-time station manager, just 10 hours a week. For me, this was like, "I would love to bring all my talents and my career thus far together to make this a success for WGDR and for Central Vermont community radio."
We've slowly increased my hours since then – I'm at 20 hours a week now, hopefully a little bit more next year. That’s my WGDR origin story – the stars quite literally aligned to make this happen.
Lisa: How do you get it all done in 20 hours?
Llu: I don't. Honestly, it's not a 20-hour-a-week job, it wasn't a 10-hour-a-week job. It probably won't even be a 32. This is part of capacity building here. We've been trying to balance how we've been spending and raising money and dedicated ourselves to creating and managing cash flow so that we're not cash-poor at any point during the year. Part of what we've inherited with the station is almost 50 years of amazing history of this counterculture station that so many people have a story about. Goddard, for anybody in central Vermont between the ages of 50-75, was the place to come through for activism and social justice, consciousness-raising, and all the stuff that was happening in the late 60s and 70s. WGDR was built in 1973. It became, quite literally, the microphone for all of that. When people would come to Goddard, they came to hang out and drift off the vibe of that campus. It was the first alternative media conference that awakened a lot of people's understanding that we do not have to have this corporate media structure, we can create alternative journalism. We take great responsibility for the history of the station.
A lot of our equipment has not been maintained and it was not upgraded. We are always one big gear failure away from a big price ticket. We actually already weathered one of those, about six months into ownership. Our transmitter died at WGDR, which is a very key piece of equipment. We’d just finished all the fundraising for 2021 and I was very nervous to ask people for another $11,000 to fund the replacement and installation of the transmitter, but we pulled it off. To me, it speaks to the dedication and listening love that our community has toward the success of the station. We have listeners who have long ago left Vermont but still tune into us online. That's part of what we're trying to balance – making sure that we are being very fiscally conservative, slowly building our capacity, and also simultaneously, investing in volunteer training. It's almost like a co-op model, in a collective sense, that the only way we're gonna be successful is not just by raising money, but by raising people's talents. We said, "let’s figure it out, let's learn it, let's divvy up the duties." That's the point that we're at right now. I joke around that this is like inheriting a 50-year-old radio station with startup problems. Like a true startup where you've got limited cash flow and limited general resources, you're trying to build the team from the ground up. Yet, we've got all these 50-year-old infrastructure problems and bills. And you know what? We’re pulling it all off.
I truly believe in the power of community radio to transform people's lives, not just the way that it did for me, but also, now more than ever, having community media be a regular part of people's lives is critical to our success as a democracy. Our strength is our communities and a sense of connection. And so to me, this isn't just a job, this checks all those other boxes – it's part of activism, it's part of being a community-minded person. These are all important values to me.
Lisa: To replace your transmitter is no small feat. Congratulations on getting that done.
Llu: Honestly, I thought the transmitter would be a hard thing that actually was easy. We were able to buy it and our engineer coached us on how to install it over the phone. He didn't even need to come up to do it. A thing that was hard to change was more about the 50-year-old problems we inherited. For example, we still had a copper phone line as our studio line. All of the new equipment to replace it does not talk to copper lines, there's no analog anything anymore. It's all digital, it all has to be VoIP on the internet. The process to do that was hard.
It was massive project management that included building our own network, getting off the Goddard College grid with security and firewall, re-wiring, IP addressing, and then getting the phone to work. The most community radio component of it is that we did it, we pulled it all off. It's all behind the scenes. Nobody really knows the details of it besides the people involved.
The hardest part of all of this was [change management]. It's hard for people to learn new things. Human error is the thing that that hangs you up. It’s a humbling process. I think it speaks to the need for nearly every community radio station, that I'm aware of, to rely on volunteers to be ready to do new things, ready to be uncomfortable with the learning curve that comes with that stuff, and also to get to the other end of it and be able to stop and celebrate that we pulled this off. We did this because we are a team. Being able to rumble together when we're in disagreement, that's equally tough, but the victories are made much more sweet because people have a shared investment in the success and therefore have a shared sense of that feeling of accomplishment.
Lisa: What's your approach to change management?
Llu: I think the best strategy for change management is modeling and persisting, and being very patient. In my career, I've not always been successful. I've always been at organizations, for one reason or another, that have been in an inflection moment, a change moment. I see what's happening here – people are uncomfortable because we're trying new things. Sometimes people want to quickly be critical because something didn't work, as opposed to reflecting and saying, "Hey, why didn't work, should we just toss it out? Should we try again?"
The thing that's helped me most at this point in my career is that I'm a parent now. I've got an almost five-year-old who has deeply taught me patience. Again, the pandemic also has added to that level of investment in the power of patience, and it has really helped me steady myself and be the solid rock that people need during big changes. The challenge is this – how do we hold space for all of that, but also be accountable, and not allow negativity and resistance to impact moving forward – because, you're not going to get everybody to always agree, and at the end of the day there still needs to be someone who's in charge of making decisions. We still have a very active founding board and the board is going through its transition now to a more traditional board role, being able to focus on policy and strategy, and resource development, as opposed to getting in the weeds.
Nobody likes getting things wrong, nobody likes having tough conversations. The whole point of community radio is right in the title – community. You've got to come together and be in space together. Also, we've been accomplishing it all while we're still working remotely.
Being able to authentically connect with each other [remotely], and building relationships and trust has by far been the weirdest part of this because all the other change stuff I've done was in the before times. We would sit in meetings together, and get a cup of coffee with somebody to build that relationship. This has just been a totally different way to do it. And yet, I see many signs of the success of these moments. I feel like radio could be, dare I say, fun, and most importantly, we are putting out a product that we're all feeling really proud about. That's the direction I keep trying to move people in.
I'm such a 90s kid, but I think about Captain Planet a lot. The concept of the powers combined. He doesn’t have his power unless all five people come together with their elements. I often think about that as an analogy – I cannot do this by myself. The concept of power hoarding, which is often what people run up against, is of no interest to me. I think the trick about change management is reminding people that they've had the power all along. That's what makes successful organizations. Finding that sweet spot, when there's power-sharing, when people feel empowered, and when they actually are empowered. I’m inspired by a powerful quote from Adrienne Maree Brown: “What we give our attention to grows.”