Croton & Ossining's WDFH: Volunteer Voices

When one thinks of volunteering there's often a misconception that you act as a slave to the organization and will simply stuff envelopes or make cold calls.  Here at WDFH we are completely volunteer operated, so in order to make things work smoothly we need to train our volunteers how to operate a radio station.

Many of our volunteers have little or no radio experience and some are only familiar with the oldschool way of doing things.  Di Walker is getting ready to produce a new program and has been involved in a crash course in digital editing.  Here's what she has to say about it:

I am having such a blast learning about digital editing! I got into radio long before computers were in wide use, with the exception of automation systems. We used reel to reel recorders and marked the tape with a grease pencil, used an editing block and razor blades to splice our edits and something like heavy scotch tape to hold the ends together. It was crude, but that's all we ever had. In order to figure out where one sound ended and another started, you had to rock the reels of tape back and forth and listen! Now, you can do all of this on a computer where you can SEE where sounds start and end, and the combination of seeing and listening make editing much easier than it was "in the old days."

Mixing is great fun - you put your voice tracks and music all together in a very logical way. If you can use MS Word, you can learn editing and mixing. Where else could a volunteer learn these things and get to do them? Perhaps if you're an intern at a commercial or even another public radio station...but they would probably expect you to already know "the basics" when you arrived.

Volunteering at WDFH enables one to learn and grow. And acquiring new skills and knowledge is so exciting. Even if you think you are not "technically inclined," you might be surprised at what you can learn as a WDFH volunteer.

For more information on how to become a volunteer at WDFH, please go here.  We look forward to hearing from you.