WRFI Community Radio

Support for WRFI comes from listeners, locally owned businesses, community events, and non-profits operating in our listening areas.

This July we want to extend our gratitude to our recent underwriters, and monthly supporters who have helped support the radio programming we bring you daily:

Sciencenter
Finger Lakes GrassRoots Festival of Music and Dance
Downtown Ithaca
Hupstate Circus Festival
Ithaca Pride Alliance
Found in Ithaca: antiques, vintage and unusual objects
Finger Lakes ReUse
Wide Awake Bakery
Contemporary Trends
The Cherry Arts
Resident Noise
Sustainable Finger Lakes

Learn about ways to support our independent station at WRFI.org/SUPPORT or reach out to [email protected] to learn more.
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Tune in at 88.1 FM Ithaca, 89.7 FM Southern Finger Lakes, and 91.9 FM Watkins Glen. Stream online at WRFI.org/Listen or with the Radio ReThink app (iOS compatible).

WRFI has received it's first ever Community Empowerment Grant from the Ithaca Pride Alliance!

WRFI Community Radio is the recipient of a micro-grant from the Ithaca Pride Alliance to record and broadcast a series of local history audio "mini-sodes" highlighting q***r artists, musicians, and q***r community spaces in Ithaca and greater Tompkins County from the 20th century.

Local q***r history efforts have worked tirelessly over the last decade to increase the visibility of historic LGBTQ+ narratives in our community, but without consistent effort and integration into our daily lives, these stories don’t become common knowledge. Drawing on the research developed to produce the Ithaca LGBT History Walking Tour in 2019 and the LGBTQ+ Print Cultures Walking Tour in 2023, we plan to create a series of 10 one-to-two minute “mini-sodes” that will air multiple times each over the time period of this grant. The funding request supports the development and production costs for 4-5 of these episodes, and WRFI will match this funding through a donation of staff time and resources to develop an additional 5-6 episodes for the series to round out at 10 minisodes that will air regularly in 2026 and 2027.

Some names and locations we want to highlight include: Wendy Carlos, Harry Partch, Julius Eastman, Firebrand Books, Smedley’s Bookshop, and Common Ground among others. Radio friendly scripts will be developed from the research already completed on the LGBTQ themed walking and driving tours developed for Tompkins County over the last 5 years. Each minisode will be recorded by LGBTQ+ DJs and show hosts already affiliated with WRFI Community Radio, furthering the representation of local q***r voices on the station airwaves.

Particularly when q***r voices and narratives are being more forcefully excluded from media coverage and public spaces nationally we at WRFI think that joyful and appreciative inclusion through a local history lens has the possibility to shift perspectives and educate more of our listening audience on the impact and contributions of q***r community on our local culture.

Our thanks to the Ithaca Pride Alliance for supporting this project, to DJ Danielle Bass of Monsoon Radio who encouraged the station to apply for this project, and to Luca Maurer and Dr. Jeffry Iovannone respectively for giving WRFI permission to use research and content from the walking tours to introduce these local histories to new audiences.