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About Us

Mission & Vision

Frequencies of Change Media (FoC Media) uses audio storytelling to inspire a more just world. As a journalism organization committed to truth, we honor the rich wisdom and lived experience of historically oppressed and marginalized communities. Through our radio show and podcast, “Making Contact,” we challenge harmful power structures and move toward the future we envision.

Our vision is a just and thriving world based on collective healing and interdependence. We embrace the human experience in all its complexity. Through the power of storytelling, challenge dominant narratives and empower communities to engage in meaningful action.

Our Core Activities

  • Since 1995, we produce “Making Contact,” a radio show and podcast that digs into the story beneath the story—contextualizing the narratives that shape our culture. Our team produces stories on critical issues, including the environment, labor, economics, government accountability, health, and race.
  • Through our Emerging Voices Fellowship program, we offer in-depth training for aspiring audio journalists and community storytellers based in Oakland, California. To date, we have trained ten storytellers to enrich the culture and create sustainability for Oakland’s communities of color. 
  • We provide fiscal sponsorship to values-aligned media projects to fundraise for their projects. We are a fiscal sponsor for Escribana, Aging Antolini, and The Slave is Gone. For more information, please send us an email.

Comment Policy

We welcome your comments on our story posts and social media, as long as they are respectful, relevant and civil in tone. In order to maintain this site as a trusted and useful resource, we reserve the right to remove any post that does not comply with our Comment Policy, or simply is not in keeping with our editorial standards for civility. Any commenter who ignores our policies may be banned permanently and without notice. We may delete any comment that contains:

  • Slander, personal attacks or abusive, hateful, threatening or offensive language or material. We won’t tolerate discrimination or hate speech including racism and transphobia, or degrading comments about things like race, religion, culture, sexual orientation, ability, gender or identity
  • Spam or links to spam, including repeated attempts to redirect readers to another website 
  • Fake email addresses or profiles
  • Comments off-topic to the article
  • All capital letters
  • Intentionally inflammatory rhetoric
  • Links to inappropriate or unrelated content
  • Identical, repetitive comments posted on multiple articles
  • Excessively long URLs
  • Graphics
  • Personal information, such as addresses, phone numbers, emails, etc.
  • Blatantly promotional content
  • Reproduced copyrighted articles from other sources: provide a link only
  • More than 300 words. Text continued to another post to bypass the word limit will be deleted

Our comment section is provided for listeners’ opinions. Making Contact staff and board do not fact-check the statements posted as comments, and do not necessarily agree with the opinions. Disclaimer: Making Contact is not responsible for injury or liability to any reader or commenter resulting from the content posted on the site, or from comments posted by readers, that may be viewed as offensive, misleading, inaccurate, illegal, or otherwise unsuitable. Adapted, with thanks, from CommonDreams.org.

Editorial Independence Policy

We subscribe to standards of editorial independence adopted by the Institute for Nonprofit News:

Our organization retains full authority over editorial content to protect the best journalistic and business interests of our organization. We maintain a firewall between news coverage decisions and sources of all revenue. Acceptance of financial support does not constitute implied or actual endorsement of donors or their products, services or opinions.

We accept gifts, grants and sponsorships from individuals and organizations for the general support of our activities, but our news judgments are made independently and not on the basis of donor support.

Our organization may consider donations to support the coverage of particular topics, but our organization maintains editorial control of the coverage. We will cede no right of review or influence of editorial content, nor of unauthorized distribution of editorial content.

Our organization will make public all donors who give a total of $5,000 or more per year. We will accept anonymous donations for general support only and we will not accept donations from government entities, political parties, elected officials, or candidates actively seeking public office. We will not accept donations from sources who, deemed by our Board of Directors, present a conflict of interest with our work or compromise our independence.

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