African Community Radio, KETO FM, Coming to Colorado

KETO FM, Col­orado, USA

As Colorado’s African com­mu­ni­ty grows, the needs of the com­mu­ni­ty have increased as well. It may be time for an African Radio in Col­orado, focused on the needs of the community. 

We’ve seen how Amer­i­can local gov­ern­ments, city coun­cils, and munic­i­pal­i­ties around the area address these chal­lenges of growth, from boost­ing road infra­struc­ture expen­di­tures to address­ing issues asso­ci­at­ed with housing.

For a com­mu­ni­ty that has become woven into the fab­ric of the state’s most diverse city, this is an issue of which Auro­ra is keen­ly aware. So, offi­cials have held meet­ings with lead­ers and oth­er cit­i­zens geared toward inte­gra­tion as new peo­ple come into town.

How do you inform a com­mu­ni­ty as diverse as Auro­ra, with peo­ple and lan­guages from all cor­ners of the world? How do you get the news– infor­ma­tion, cul­ture, enter­tain­ment, and oth­er rel­e­vant mate­r­i­al –flow­ing to Aurora’s many Africans?

This is a role that Rocky Moun­tain Mul­ti­cul­tur­al Com­mu­ni­ty radio aka KETO FM plans and hopes to ful­fill. The non-com­mer­cial radio sta­tion will soon be oper­at­ing on 93.9 FM in Den­ver and the sur­round­ing area.

Hun­dreds of Ethiopi­ans, Soma­lis, Eritre­ans, Sudanese, Kenyans, Ugan­dans, Ghana­ians, and immi­grants from many African nations liv­ing in the metro area would be impact­ed when KETO debuts. While there are sev­er­al Africa-focused inter­nets or web radio sta­tions already oper­at­ing in the area such as Den­ver African Radio, KETO will be dif­fer­ent. It will oper­ate, not via the inter­net, but on the FM radio dial.

The low-pow­er fre­quen­cy mod­u­la­tion (LPFM) was licensed in 2014 and since then has been in prepa­ra­tion mode to kick things off.  Prepa­ra­tions involve the con­struc­tion of a radio tow­er in and around Auro­ra. That has been a chal­lenge, as Endale Getahun, founder and sta­tion man­ag­er, told Auro­ra Sentinel’s Rachel Sapin in this August 20 inter­view.

After a Sep­tem­ber 16 stake­hold­ers meet­ing in Auro­ra, Gete­hum told me he’s soon to sign a mem­o­ran­dum of under­stand­ing with Auro­ra Pub­lic Schools (APS) which will “donate” their tow­er to the sta­tion.  In return, KETO will offer a few hours of pro­gram­ming a week to APS.

But the KETO sta­tion still needs to pur­chase oth­er sup­port equip­ment to oper­ate. Gete­hum said he is being helped in this effort by sev­er­al peo­ple, includ­ing for­mer Auro­ra city coun­cil­woman, Debi Hunter Holen, who is the com­mu­ni­ty engage­ment advo­cate with APS, as well as Ward IV coun­cil­man, Char­lie Richardson.

Richard­son said he is not hap­py that help for KETO has been slow com­ing. While he expressed frus­tra­tion, he said he hopes the com­mu­ni­ty will step up and pro­vide the sup­port that is need­ed to get this going quickly.

Because of the high demand for these kinds of sta­tions from the U.S. Fed­er­al Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Com­mis­sion (FCC), the fre­quen­cy allot­ted to KETO will be shared with Christ’s Church Apos­tolic , also in Aurora.