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!
Radio Friends:
For those of you who don’t know, I’m the founder and director of a newly formed non-profit organization called Ears To Our World (ETOW). ETOW’s mission is to send self-powered shortwave radios to schools in the developing world–you may have seen us recently featured in the Dec. 2009 edition of Popular Communications. You can check us out at:
Many of you have been watching and listening to the reports coming out of Haiti in the aftermath of the recent earthquake. As you can imagine, the need for information in Haiti is urgent and that means, of course, that radios are needed. In light of this crisis, ETOW has decided to temporarily broaden our mission; next week we will send a substantial number of ETOW radios (donated by Eton/Grundig) to Haiti via our partner, Operation USA. We are preparing our radios for shipment as rapidly as we can.
As shortwave listeners, DXers and amateur radio operators, you know well the power of radio. If you’d like to help, please do what you can. Even a few bucks can help with our expedited shipping costs to get our radios to Haiti. Donations can be made via PayPal on ETOW’s website http://earstoourworld.org.
Let’s all do what we can to help these folks.
Thank you,
Thomas
