It has been an interesting year.

Early in the year we received notification that the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) had approved our application for a low power FM (LPFM) radio station.

We did some brain storming and came up with a few preferred choices for our call letters.  We applied for and received WMFH-LP.

We ran a crowd funding campaign on indiegogo.com, bringing in about a thousand dollars.  As a “perk” for that campaign we worked with a t-shirt company to design a shirt and get some printed up.

We put together  this web site, humble though it may be.

We continued working on our station automation system with the Rivendell software, downloading and cataloging content from the librivox.org website.

We went to a local-charities intro event at the Columbus Lowndes County Library.

We joined the Columbus Chamber of Commerce and attended a few of their events.

We expanded our board of directors to include more voices from the community.

We applied for  and received non-profit status 501(c)3 from the IRS  (so contributions are tax deductible!).

We put together an initial offering plan for underwriting and presented that opportunity to a dozen or more local businesses by email, postal mail and in person.

We searched the world for grant-making foundations and government organizations, seeking start up funds to buy our transmitter and EAS/CAP machine.  We have contacted over a dozen potential grant sources.

We designed and built an antenna (yet to be tested).

We toured non-commercial radio station operations at Mississippi State University (WMSV) and Mississippi University for Women (WMUW).

We have acquired some donated equipment:  computer system, microphones, telephone interface box.

We also have been in contact with experts in the fields of literacy education, radio reading service for the sight impaired, and radio station construction.

We had a great board meeting on the Monday before Thanksgiving. It was a refreshing time of looking over the last few months, reviewing our progress. We have come a long way since a year ago when our application with the FCC had us on pins and needles! We have our station construction permit, our 501(c)3 status, and a growing pile of equipment and content.

Looking forward, our big hurdle is to locate funding to buy a transmitter and related equipment and get our station on the air. Our “Get On The Air” project goal is $12,000. (Other LPFM stations starting from ground zero will have a budget roughly twice that. Having a radio tower and some studio/operating space, we are halfway there!)

From September through November we have applied for grants with over a dozen private and corporate foundations. Most of them have yet to reply, a couple have declined outright and one replied that they would consider our case in an upcoming board meeting. Whew!

Oh! I should also mention that we have signed up for Amazon Smile, a version of amazon.com shopping site which can be used to donate 0.5% of your purchases to charity. If you buy a $100.00 item on smile.amazon.com, 50 cents will go to charity. That’s not a whole lot, but every little bit counts. Please make Classic Book Radio your Amazon Smile charity!

For those of you thinking so far ahead that you are considering your end-of-year tax picture, contributions to Classic Book Radio are completely tax deductible.

—
Chris Howard

I’ve been working on applying to foundations and grant-making organizations.  To do that I needed a budget that I could present and point to.

I have three steps in the budget:  1) the bare minimum (goal $12,000) , 2) what would be nice to have (goal $18,000), and 3) “in my dreams”

GetOnTheAir – project budget

Arriving home from a short trip, I found a letter in our accumulated mail from the Internal Revenue Service.

Yes!  They have approved us as a 501(c)3 organization!  That means contributions to WMFH-LP are tax deductible!

And it also means we are now able to apply for financial grants from foundations and such, more potential sources for the start-up funds we need.

The determination is retroactive and applies to any contributions since we have been up and running.

This is really good news.