Many of you know how important I consider shortwave radio to be in the third world and for those living under repressive regimes. Radio France International recently interviewed me regarding these views and my position as the founder and director of the charity, Ears To Our World.
Click here to download the interview, or listen on RFI’s website.
Many thanks to RFI’s Brent Gregston for giving Ears To Our World air time!
Doulek’s Association of Disabled People, Cameroon (Photo: ETOW)
This holiday season, you might consider giving a charitable donation to Ears To Our World. A one time donation of $40 US can help a community through the power of shortwave radio.
Many readers may know that I’m quite involved with ETOW.
We recently published this article showing the impact of one self-powered shortwave radio in rural Cameroon. It’s pretty amazing and this mission would not be possible without the support of those who understand the importance and impact of shortwave radio; people like you. Thank you!
Shortwave Radio Listeners may occasionally feel that their hobby is a passive one–one of simply listening. I’m here to tell you that it is not.
SWLers are among the more enlightened of media hobbyists, and here’s why: 1) they tend to be intensely curious about the world, 2) they tend to cultivate a nostalgic appreciation of the past, of the world’s history and what it teaches, and 3) as a result, they understand the power that radio still holds for much of our world today, especially those the not-so-world-wide internet has forgotten or overlooked, and those that political strife oppresses.
This World Radio Day, you can change that false label of “passive” to active, and create change by contributing to a charity near and dear to my heart–Ears To Our World (ETOW).
ETOW is a shortwave radio charity that sends self-powered shortwave radios to schools and communities in third world countries. This is because ETOW believes that access to information is access to education.
In other words, every day is World Radio Day at ETOW.
Children in South Sudan listening to music on their self-powered shortwave radio supplied by Ears To Our World.
Click here to donate to Ears To Our World, and make World Radio Day a lasting reality for needy schools throughout our world.
Happy World Radio Day! To quote ETOW’s tagline: Listen and learn.
More power to you, SWLers.
ETOW's self-powered shortwave radios continue to be an invaluable source of information in post-earthquake Haiti.
August 20th is National Radio Day, a day for celebrating the invention of radio and this amazing 110+ year old communications medium, still so vital to information access throughout our world.
Those of you who still believe in the relevance of radio, please consider giving the gift of radio by making a tax-deductible donation to Ears To Our World (ETOW). ETOW sends self-powered (wind-up) shortwave radios to some of our planet’s most rural and impoverished schools and communities, often where there is no internet access nor power grid.
We’ve mentioned ETOW in many previous posts. The organization has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, Popular Communications, the BBC World Service, VOA, and Public Radio International’s The World Technology podcast.
Those who think shortwave radio has limited use in today’s information age should see how much impact it has in parts of the world where ETOW works. In these regions, often remote or war-torn, radio connects communities with the rest of the world–and it can mean the world.
Shortwave radio charity, ETOW (Ears To Our World) has been featured in this week’s PRI’s The World Technology Podcast. If you’ve never heard of ETOW, check out our previous posts or simply visit ETOW’s website. Self-powered shortwave radios are an integral part of their mission to provide “appropriate” technologies to schools and children in the third world.
Click here to go to PRI’s webpage for The World Technology Podcast.
Thank you to Radio World for publishing this:
A teacher with an ETOW radio in Bor County, Southern Sudan. Courtesy Project Education Sudan
For as long as I can remember I’ve been passionate about radio.
From my earliest childhood memories in the 1980s during those final fading days of the Cold War — of my dad tuning in WWV in Fort Collins, Colo., on his dad’s vintage RCA 6K3; of falling asleep listening to my then-old-fashioned AM transistor radio; and of drinking in all those mysterious DX stations I heard over shortwave and medium-wave … I was the sort of kid (a throwback to a former generation, one might say) who couldn’t get enough of radio.
In those days when cable TV and video games and the first PCs upstaged and supplanted radio in nearly every American household, even in the blue collar town in which I grew up, it was nonetheless radio that captured my imagination, and taught me early on that everyone has a story. Radio taught me, too, that each voice is different in his or her consideration of what’s meaningful or newsworthy. I learned to understand or at least appreciate the diverse perspectives I heard in my vicarious radio journeys, and from these sprang my own opinions, hopes, beliefs. Radio became my teacher—a teacher who gave me, in my formative years, a global perspective.
I would have to say that radio has shaped my life. I suppose that’s why radio recently has become a mission for me…
…Today, I am the founder and director of Ears to Our World, a grassroots charitable organization with a simple objective: distributing self-powered world-band radios to schools and communities in the third world, so that kids, not to mention those who teach them, can learn about their world, too.
I want others –– children and young people, especially –– who lack reliable access to information, to have the world of radio within their reach.
Click here to read the full article.
More links:
From the Wall Street Journal Magazine:
Source: ETOW Partner - The Empower Campaign
“This is the sound of renewable education!” says Thomas Witherspoon, 37, founder of Ears to Our World, as he picks up a small portable radio and quickly cranks its handle, producing a high-pitched, wobbly whine. Inside, a dynamo charges the radio’s battery. Witherspoon has taken his love of shortwave radio and filtered it through his experience in the corporate world, devising a strategy to help the most people for the least money. ETOW distributes wind-up radios to isolated villages across Africa and into Belize and Romania, providing listeners with vital information. His radios are also proving to be disaster-relief heroes in earthquake-devastated Haiti.
Thomas Witherspoon of ETOW. Source: WSJ Mag, Randy Harris
“We give them to schools, and teachers use them to enhance the classroom experience,” Witherspoon says. “It’s not dependent on power. It’s not dependent on Internet or any other infrastructures.” Founded in 2008, ETOW has grown quickly, squeezing the most out of minimal funding by collaborating with established educational organizations, and by taking advantage of the one-to-many model inherent in broadcasting. “I’ve heard stories coming back from some of our partners that when someone’s listening to a radio, you can guarantee there’s going to be 10, 20 people listening at the same time,” Witherspoon says.
Read the full article at the Wall Street Journal website and consider expanding your radio hobby by donating to ETOW!
