Common Voices - Canada

Common Voices uses community radio to bring diverse people's voices to bear on issues that reach across borders. Because it highlights those working "in the field" or on the front lines of economic and social change, the series is a strategy for creating common experiences, shared needs, and opportunities for solidarity.

Concretely, the radio series explores development issues in a way that builds connections between people and the problems they face - even those living very different lives around the world. Many of the programmes highlight connections between Canadian and African initiatives and realities. For example, programme 1 "HIV/AIDS Prevention from the Bottom Up: A Story from Mozambique and Saskatchewan" profiles the work going on HIV/AIDS prevention in villages in Mozambique and in the City of Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. It discusses similarities and differences between what community health workers face in these disparate areas. And "Worker to Worker: Linking Occupational Health and Safety - Mozambique and Canada" explores how workers have built bridges internationally to support each other in worker-to-worker health and safety practices. Some of the programmes have an advocacy or activist spin in that they highlight the way in which organic and family farming practices have been infringed on by industralisation and other hallmarks of globalisation. To cite only one, "Global Agricultural Links" features the voice of a farm leader and philosopher Nettie Wiebe talking about how farmers are organising internationally against exploitative international trade agreements; the programme focusses on solidarity links between farmers in Mexico and Canada. War and peace issues are at the centre of two of the programmes; the words of a Sudanese poet figure prominently in one of these.

This initiative uses radio as well as the Internet and printed scripts of the programmes to enable non-Canadians to access the series. Visitors to the Common Voices page on Making the Links site are invited to download the programmes and listen to them online; organisers ask that people communicate with them via email to explain how they are using the broadcasts. Printed versions of the series are available free of charge.

Making the Links is a Saskatoon, Canada-based community radio collective "committed to reporting on international and local issues in a way that is informative, indepth and offers coverage not normally found in the mainstream media". It has profiled communities and people working to create an equitable and sustainable world.