Community Service Grants

KEET steps up membership efforts to hold on to federal funding

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KEET-TV, one of the smallest PBS member stations, has grown its membership by 40 percent and raised more than $600,000 over the past six months in an effort to keep its federal Community Service Grant. Local businesses in Eureka, Calif., have posted banners pushing “The Power of One,” the motto of KEET’s campaign. Website pop-ups show viewers holding signs with titles of their favorite public TV shows. A local utility provider is pitching in, donating a portion of each paid petroleum bill to the station. At issue is KEET’s inability to meet the $800,000 minimum in nonfederal financial support that CPB requires of CSG grantees, which the station has never done in its 45-year history.

Programs/Content

First-ever indigenous people’s channel launches with limited distribution

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The United States’ first 24/7 television channel for indigenous people has begun airing on a handful of public television stations across the country. The channel’s launch was limited, as producing station KVCR in San Bernardino, Calif., seeks a national distribution deal and additional funding. In addition to KVCR, FNX: First Nations Experience is carried by KEET in Eureka, Calif., LPTV in Bemidji, Minn., and Navajo Nation TV-5, which covers parts of New Mexico and Arizona. Chicago’s WYCC and Oklahoma’s CATV-47 plan to begin airing the channel soon. Meanwhile, technical difficulties with FNX equipment have delayed its launch on Wyoming PBS.

Programs/Content

Tiny KEET’s Big Bands reveals musical life in incarceration camps

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KEET in Eureka, Calif. — one of the smallest TV stations in the pubcasting system — has produced a unique documentary featuring woodcut animation: Searchlight Serenade: Big Bands in the Japanese American Incarceration Camps. The 58-minute film provides first-person accounts of nine detainees who played trumpet and saxophone and sang for their fellow prisoners. Their stories are animated with traditional Japanese woodcuts and drawings by local artist Amy Uyeki, whose parents had lived in the camps. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, in 1941, more than 120,000 Japanese Americans were forced into the holding areas during World War II.