FJP Community Network Grant Winner: Koahnic Broadcast Corporation

Humanize urban audiences’ understanding of rural Alaska through a climate desk that publishes multimedia stories from the perspectives of Alaska Natives.

$25,000

Koahnic Broadcast Corporation (KBC) seeks matching support to launch a “KBC Climate Desk” in 2020. For this project, we will engage with Alaskans to determine what matters most to them about the issues, and produce stories that focus on Alaska Native resilience and adaptation in the face of climate change.

Too often, Alaska Natives are portrayed in the media as victims of climate change, and sparsely represented in reports as opposed to the “experts.” We will create, curate, and distribute multimedia stories with unique Alaska Native perspectives. Our work will humanize a complex issue, and connect urban audiences to climate change issues in rural Alaska.

Alaskan and national audiences will gain the invaluable opportunity to learn from, and engage with, rural communities at the frontlines of climate change. At the same time, this project will build our capacity to effectively convey the ways in which Alaska Natives are adapting to a changing environment.

This project is strongly connected to building sustainability for this topical coverage. Sharing compelling stories from underserved Alaskan communities will support our efforts to build audience, and increase audience and community investment in our work, and we will cultivate new sponsorship specifically for our “KBC Climate Desk” productions.

Additionally, we will develop an Impact Tracker tool, modeled on one created by The Center for Investigative Reporting, to follow how radio and online features increase awareness about how climate change is experienced in Alaska. This tracking will give us a powerful feedback loop to measure audience engagement.

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