Live from the studio! Reflections from one year on the air

It has been a year since we started broadcasting online at Sooke.live with a handful of volunteers recording from their homes with our "studio in a suitcase" of rentable equipment.

Now, the station has grown into a seven-day-a-week community radio station powered entirely by volunteers, with a physical studio space opened in partnership with the Sooke Region Museum & Visitor Centre.

Before the studio, so much of the station lived inside Discord messages, Zoom calls, late-night troubleshooting, and people broadcasting from living rooms and kitchen tables.

Now there is a real space where people can walk in, sit down together, learn from each other, experiment, laugh, panic when buttons get pushed accidentally, and create something together.

We still have people out with their little recorders, interviewing Sookies about their events, their cool ideas, and their opinions on local news.

But now we also have a physical home! There’s a special magic in watching someone come into the studio nervous and unsure if they belong there… and then hearing them confidently host their own show a short time later.

That’s community radio. The radio station we built together!

Over the past year, new broadcasters have been trained; programming has expanded; and volunteers from all kinds of backgrounds have found their way into the station: musicians, storytellers, interviewers, audio nerds, complete beginners, and people who simply wanted to feel more connected to their community.

Some people joined because they love music. Some because they wanted to learn something new. Some because they were looking for connection.

One volunteer even moved to Sooke after retirement partly because he heard about the station and wanted to be part of it!

The station has broadcast from festivals, community events, and live music shows. We've partnered with Cafe Vosino to run Parties on the Patio, highlighting local musicians and creating a new evening all-ages venue.

Conversations have ranged from local arts and nature to wellness, history, community issues, and wonderfully niche passions that probably only exist on the airwaves of a small town radio station.

There have been many creative solutions on our shoestring budget, and figuring things out as we go. Very late nights fixing audio problems. Last-minute scrambling before live shows. Unexpected moments of magic.

Right now there are more than 40 active volunteers and over 80 supporting members helping make this possible. Every person who hosts a show, helps carry equipment, shares an event poster, donates, interviews a guest, or tunes in to listen has helped build this station.

As the station moves into its second year on the air, and its first full year with a physical studio, the focus is on deepening what has already begun: more training, more live broadcasting from community events, more opportunities for people to participate, more local voices, and more connection.

Community radio is about creating spaces where people feel heard, about neighbours meeting each other, about sharing our stories and celebrating the incredible people making their homes here.

Thank you to every volunteer, listener, supporter, donor, musician, guest, community partner, and passionate person who has helped build this unconventional and beautiful thing together.

Thank you for helping build community infrastructure by and for Sooke.

We are so proud of our collective progress in the first few years of this dream made real.

Please consider becoming a sustaining member, volunteering, or pitching your own show! We would love to work with you, whether you've been doing radio forever or you've never done anything like this.

If you live here, this is for you.