Giving a voice to those who usually don't have one

We live in a paradoxical moment: we have never had so much access to information, and at the same time we have never been so uninformed. Amidst the media noise, dominant narratives and the growing presence of hate speech, it is increasingly necessary to recover communication spaces rooted in the territory , where people and groups that are usually absent from conventional media can explain themselves in their own voices.

It is from this conviction that from El Far Cooperatiu , with our mission of making transformative communication and wanting to put it at the service of people, we have wanted to promote the first community radio in Tarragona . The objective is not to direct it, but to provide the resources and the necessary infrastructure so that those interested groups can make it their own. The challenge is that the radio ends up being governed collectively by the entire community fabric of the city.

Beyond the communicative aspect, the self-management of a community radio also strengthens community bonds . Here, communication acts practically as an excuse for people and groups to meet, empower themselves, organize themselves and continue to make things happen. And radio therefore becomes an amplifying element within the transformative communication ecosystem.

Generating your own content also helps to strengthen the circulation of knowledge between people and territories. An initiative that helps to break the isolation of social movements, enriching content and building a shared story of resistance and social transformation between different groups.

The impetus for Tarragona's community radio is already on the table. Now it remains to empower organizations and citizens to begin taking the first steps by forming a driving group that will be responsible for jointly defining the identity and operation of the radio, as well as proposing content.

To make this happen, advised by Comsoc , we are now starting an open participatory process defined by three phases. First, we will organize a first dynamic meeting under the title 'The house of our radio', inspired by community communication methodologies, which will serve to imagine what type of radio we want to build and what name it should have. Then we will convene a second working session to define what we want the space to be like, the tools and materials necessary to be able to carry it out. And finally, we will begin to make the first broadcasts in the test phase.

Promoting a community radio is therefore, for us, a coherent way of continuing to do what gives meaning to the mission of El Far: putting communication at the service of people . It is not just about building a station, but opening a communication channel where experiences, knowledge and perspectives that hardly find a place in conventional circuits can be shared. It is a commitment to strengthening democracy from below , to caring for the bonds that unite us and to claiming that communication can be a tool for equity, empowerment and social transformation .