A few times a year, we ask for your financial support to keep WFUV and The Alternate Side going strong as an independent source of music and information. This is how the public radio "honor system" of listener contributions works.

Funding Breakdown

WFUV and The Alternate Side receive financial support from five major sources: Listeners (58%), Corporate Underwriting (24%), Federal/CPB Funding (13%) Fordham University (4%) and New York State (1%).

Federal Funding

This station, along with most public radio and television stations, receives a critical part of its support through Congressionally-appropriated funds managed through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (“CPB”).

In order to qualify for these CPB funds, we must raise a certain amount of money from listeners, and in 2012-13 there's a higher bar and we are falling short of their requirement. It's like the biggest challenge grant ever: Your membership contributions ensure that we can receive these important funds. The sudden loss of that resource would be difficult to replace and could mean serious cutbacks in what we can bring to you.

Also: Some legislators aim to cut or eliminate Federal dollars for CPB, affecting 170,000,000 public broadcasting users nationwide. We hope you consider speaking out for us to your Congressional reps. The web site 170MillionAmericans.org can keep you posted on that situation.

Corporate Support

What are corporate underwriters? Corporate underwriters are businesses and organizations which support us by purchasing short, non-commercial messages, on-air and online. [more info]

Fordham University

What's our relationship to Fordham University? WFUV is licensed to Fordham University. Fordham provides in-kind support, such as rent-free studio office space, and about 4% of our operations budget. WFUV and The Alternate Side are managed by an over 30-person professional staff with a mission to provide a unique public radio service, share the resources of the university with the community, and train the broadcasters of tomorrow. About 70 students work here in various capacities, and many go on to careers in media.

If there are any other questions you'd like answered, email us anytime at thefolks@wfuv.org.