Council Meetings

Quarterly Meetings and Community Dialogues

Quarterly Meetings

The WAMU Community Council meets four times a year. Meetings are held in the community room at the station, which is located at 4000 Brandywine Street in northwest Washington, D.C., and are open to the public. Kenneth E. Barnes, Sr. and Dale Clayton Morrison serve as the Chair and Vice Chair of the Council. Dates and times for the quarterly meetings are posted on our website and announced on-air at least seven days in advance. For further information, please call Anne Healy at (202) 885-1264 or send an e-mail to ahealy@wamu.org.

The WAMU 88.5 Community Council held its final quarterly meeting of 2007 on Thursday, December 13th. The Council approved the report of its nominating committee which recommended the appointment of five new members to serve on the Council. They will be appointed by WAMU’s General Manager, Caryn Mathes, to terms beginning on January 1, 2008. The new members are: Laura Chambers, Chief Operating Officer for Civic Ventures, a nonprofit think tank focused on utilizing the experience of the growing aging community to help solve society’s greater social problems; Manuel (Manny) Hidalgo, Executive Director of the Latino Economic Development Corporation (LEDC) a nonprofit corporation with a mission to improve the wealth-building capacity of low to moderate income Latinos and other underserved communities in the Washington Metropolitan Area; Louis Bransford, a retired telecommunications executive who serves as Chairman of the Board of the Public Service Telecommunications Corporation (PSTC); Mary Briggs, Director of Cultural Development of the Cultural Affairs Division of Arlington County, Virginia; and, Maria Gomez, President and CEO of Mary’s Center for Maternal and Child Care which serves the family needs of more than 15,000 individuals and families from across the D.C. Metropolitan area. Council Members also elected the officers for 2008. Kenneth E. Barnes, Sr. will continue as Chair of the Community Council and Dale Clayton Morrison will assume the position of Vice Chair.

Community Dialogues

The WAMU Community Council sponsored five outstanding Community Dialogues during 2007. These off-the-record discussion meetings focused on issues of concern to our community and provided background information and valuable contacts for the station's news and programming staff. We started off the year with a discussion in February about some of the programs which are working in the DC Public Schools. Participants included the Assistant Superintendent for Curriculum & Instruction, the head of the Student Support Group for the DC Public Charter Schools, and the Coordinator of the Science, Mathematics and Technology Academy at Wilson Senior High School. The March Community Dialogue focused on gun violence and the prevalence of guns in our community and featured a powerful video which vividly captured the loss of so many young lives due to senseless gang violence. In May, a follow-up discussion was held on what is working in education in the District of Columbia and participants talked about some of the private programs which have been created to serve children from disadvantaged neighborhoods. The Community Dialogue which was held in October focused on the “Challenge of the Chesapeake” and why despite so many efforts to “Save the Bay” the pollution of this great natural resource continues. The topic for the fifth and final discussion meeting was “The Impact of Nonprofit Organization in our Community” and participants discussed the controversial issue of whether nonprofit charitable organizations should be held to a similar standard of “return on investment” as is conventional in the for-profit world.