In 1985, Frieda Werden was offered the job of Operations Manager at Western Public Radio in San Francisco, and as an incentive she was told she could do any project of her own there she wanted. That\u2019s where Frieda co-founded WINGS: Women\u2019s International News Gathering Service. The project started with a list of women radio producers who had attended the third UN World Conference on Women in Nairobi, Kenya.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This was 1985 \u2013 no email, no google, no cell phones. They wrote letters to each other and tapes were sent in the mail! One tape that came from Russia couldn\u2019t even be played on local machines \u2013 they had to unwind the tape by hand onto another reel before it could be played.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The WINGS pilot was funded by NPR\u2019s Satellite program Development Fund and it went up on the Public Radio satellite in Spring 1986.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
WINGS won the Golden Reel award from the National Federation of Community Radio Broadcasters, for the coverage of women\u2019s conferences in 1986.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Although the mainstream media stopped covering the global women\u2019s movement after the UN Decade for women had ended and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting stopped funding the project since \u201cthis is an idea whose time has passed\u201d, WINGS persisted.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
As it turned out, those first 10 years of the Decade for Women were just what it took for women around the world to get to talking across boundaries and realize their commonalities. These included not just women\u2019s rights, but planetary issues like peace, economic development, and the environment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Our WINGS slogan became \u201craising women\u2019s voices through radio worldwide,\u201d and our motto: \u201cToday\u2019s news is tomorrow\u2019s history \u2013 keep women\u2019s actions on the record!\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Operating on a shoestring compared to what public radio producers need, WINGS managed to pay the women producers and train many of them. A lot of thanks for that go to Genevieve Vaughan, the woman who called that meeting of radio women at the Nairobi conference. We built and continue building an international network of reporters and an international network of stations to carry the programs, and WINGS has now been in weekly distribution for more than 30 years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Co-producer and Frieda\u2019s life partner Katherine Davenport passed away in 1992, and Frieda has been the WINGS series producer since then. Since 1996, Frieda has had the companionship and moral support of her life partner Suzette Cullen and have worked with a lot of very good editors and contributing producers around the world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Suzette helped Frieda put on a Women\u2019s Media Camp on the island where they live in 2015.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Mindy Ran is a freelance journalist and audio\/video producer with two decades experience of reporting on human rights, press freedom and justice issues from her base in Amsterdam. She is working on updating WINGS and is slowly taking over management of the series as Frieda ages.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Mich\u00e8le Schuler has long time experience in running small non for profit organizations in the Netherlands. She will be responsible for (maintenance of) the website and social media and in the future managing the office.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is a recent website, but you can still find the website and archive that was built for us in 1994 at wings.org.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
WINGS also has a Facebook page \u2013 facebook.com\/wingsradio \u2013 where we post lots of the many news items about women that come our way.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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