by Joe Courter
The date for the Civic Media Center’s annual SpringBoard fundraiser is Friday evening, March 21.
There will be a new location this year after last year’s venture at Prairie Creek Lodge, and that is in the heart of Downtown Gainesville at the Wooly, 20 N. Main St., a new event venue in what is the old Woolworth building next to and run by The Top restaurant. There will be food from various area restaurants, a silent auction and raffle items, and awards.
The speaker this year is an old friend of the CMC, David Barsamian, the founder and main man with Alternative Radio, who said he is “honored to follow in Noam’s footsteps.”
That is fitting because Alternative Radio has made a special effort to archive Noam Chomsky talks since its founding in 1989. David’s radio show was a staple of WUFT-FM in Gainesville until being dropped a couple years ago (“it was too one sided,” they said … give me a break; that is what Public Radio is supposed to do, present other sides!), but it is still on the air locally on WGOT 94.7, the CMC’s Low Power FM station, as well as on hundreds of radio stations world wide.
That’s not bad for a grassroots activist from Boulder, Colorado who brings dissident voices from around the world to audiences that otherwise would never have been reached, and regularly travels far and wide to capture these voices, or as in the case of our recent hosting of Chomsky in Gainesville, air a recording that we provided him.
David has met and dialogued with leading intellectuals like Vandana Shiva, Howard Zinn, Arundhati Roy, and many many more.
Visit www.alternativeradio.org, and you realize what a monumental contribution he has made to the body of knowledge we all need and share.
Details on the event are still being determined, but it will take place on Friday, March 21, from 6 to 9 pm at the Wooly. Advance tickets and other information is available from coordinators@civicmediacenter.org. More info will be in the March Iguana, which should be out March 5. Save the date!