KVRU is excited to announce our collaboration with local community organization Pacific Rim Solidarity Network (PARISOL) Seattle. They have joined us to develop a monthly radio show, Who Keeps Us Safe? Asian Americans Explore Safety in Our Communities and Beyond (WKUS). WKUS is one of five new community-made programs that will air during KVRU’s weekly rotating Cultural Producers Hour on Tuesdays. The first WKUS episode is launching on July 20, 2021 at 6pm PST.
Who Keeps Us Safe? is a podcast by Asian Americans living in Seattle that explores safety, policing, and abolition in our communities and beyond. Join us monthly as we speak with organizers in the Seattle area, and reflect on their work and learnings. We hope that our listeners will use this podcast to begin or supplement their own conversations about safety and policing in their communities.
This is a project of PARISOL: Pacific Rim Solidarity Network, a grassroots anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist, Hong Konger, Taiwanese, and Chinese diaspora group based in Seattle. PARISOL is dedicated to local & international solidarity, community building, cultural & politicized learning, abolition, and anti-racist work.
Q&A with Andy, Alex, and Jenn from the PARISOL Production Team:
How does radio support the work PARISOL is doing?
PARISOL: Organizing can sometimes feel unexpectedly isolating, especially in a big city or when the obstacles just seem immense and immovable. Radio is a connector, a carrier of sound and stories, and stories are an integral part of a community’s stamina and heart. We love KVRU and the way that you support our neighborhoods in the South Seattle area
What do you hope for your audience to learn while listening in to your KVRU program?
PARISOL: This podcast is best used as a supplement to folks’ own conversations about safety and policing, whether as a continuation of the conversation or as a starting point to begin delving into these issues for the first time. We are also partnering with API Chaya to publish translated transcripts of each episode, with the hopes that this can help bridge the language gap in these conversations among Asian American communities locally and nationally. Who Keeps Us Safe? is a way for listeners to normalize asking the hard questions about safety, while also staying connected to the stories & communities of folks who are wrestling with these questions and also working together to create something new. For our local listeners especially, we hope this can be one reminder that you are not alone in this work in Seattle. For all our listeners, we hope this can become a collaborative community that one day is able to create the relationships and structures to keep each other safe.
