Spokane Word

Organization Name: Spokane Word
Website: kvfsradio.com
Budget Size: $25K – $50K
Region: Eastern
County: Spokane
Artistic Focus Area: Film & Media/Cultural Heritage
Community Accelerator Grant Awards: $12,500 in 2025
Primary Impact Category: Employment, The Future
Mission Statement: Spokane Word is a multilingual community radio platform expanding access to arts, culture, and heritage through inclusive storytelling and creative media. We produce accessible, multilingual content that celebrates local music, storytelling, and traditions across diverse cultures. By centering language equity and digital access, we create a creative platform where underrepresented communities can share their stories, preserve heritage, and connect across generations and geographies.

“It feels,” Luc Jasmin says carefully, “like there’s been a lot of misinformation out there lately.” A first-generation Haitian American, Luc is the Eastern Washington Representative for Governor Bob Ferguson, a father of two, and has co-founded Spokane organizations including Jasmin Group, Parkview Early Learning Center, and Northeast Youth & Family Services. Spokane Word, founded in 2020, is the newest project on his full plate – and it wouldn’t be there if he didn’t believe its work was profoundly important. “All that misinformation pushed us to start asking, ‘How are we staying connected with our community? How are we getting accurate information out to them? Can we do that in a way that is community-led?’”

Spokane Word is the solution he, Elaina Sicilia, who serves as Spokane Word’s Program and Development Manager, and Jaycie Calvert, who got involved during her AmeriCorps service year and recently joined the team officially, have built together. It is, Jaycie tells ArtsFund, “a community radio station that is multilingual, multicultural, and multi-faith, and that specifically wants to get as many voices as possible involved.” Broadcasting to 100.3 FM locally and streaming online, Spokane Word has aired or is actively implementing upcoming programming in languages including Haitian Creole, French, Spanish, Marshallese, and Arabic, with a strong musical focus on Afrobeats and other diverse offerings that are otherwise hard to come by on Spokane’s public radio stations. To date, they have primarily amplified community voices by offering in-school workshops on local journalism, working closely with fellow multilingual nonprofits to disseminate information on their programs and events, and hosting field trips focused on video producing and audio engineering at their studio space.

For its first several years, Spokane Word has by necessity kept its operations lean, concentrating almost all available funding on building out its recording studio to make it a more useful community resource. As a small nonprofit, their $12,500 Community Accelerator Grant award has allowed them to earmark significantly more funding for programming in the year ahead, which Luc says “has gotten us out of survival mode and helped us build real consistency.” That consistency, Elaina adds, has come primarily in the form of Jaycie, who is now overseeing most of the station’s youth programs and taking to the streets of Spokane in her spare time, recorder in hand. “The best thing this grant has done for us was letting us bring on someone who’s devoted to Spokane Word, who loves it, is passionate about it, and fully sees the vision,” she enthuses. For Luc, the fact that the station can now afford for Jaycie to serve as a steadier and more reliable community presence has been essential to fully embodying its mission for the first time: “It’s great that we’ve been able to set up our station, get all our equipment, build our website. But to do what we want to do, we’ve gotta meet our community where they are, and that’s where this funding has been able to propel us.”

In recent months, Jaycie has focused her attention on building relationships with schools and community groups, producing multiple podcasts with youth contributors and working to reach a more adult audience by inviting community leaders, such as Dr. Melissa Mace of Spokane NAACP, on the air to discuss their work. Next, Spokane Word hopes to interface directly with more refugee communities. Jaycie has set up several programming workshops for refugee youth in 2026 through Refugee and Immigrant Connections Spokane. Meanwhile Luc, a pastor’s son, has been drawing on Spokane’s multi-faith church network to meet with religious leaders and discuss what the station could offer both journalistically and culturally to refugees and immigrants from Haiti, Ukraine, and Mexico. “Being able to tell their stories has been so cool,” he says. “It humanizes these communities for folks who might not know what’s been happening lately.” Spokane Word’s biggest and most ambitious project for the coming year is The American Dream, an audio documentary about Haitians in Spokane navigating the sudden federal revocation of Temporary Protected Status and humanitarian parole. “We want to help folks understand what their journey has been like,” says Luc. “I think the only way we can battle some of the misinformation and, well, frankly, the insanity that we’ve been seeing in the news lately is by telling the stories of the brave people who are here trying to contribute to our community, going to school, going to work.”

Over the coming year, Spokane Word hopes to grow its listenership; put time, attention, and care into its many partnerships; and continue to tell the lesser-known stories of a place that is, as Luc points out, the seventh whitest city in the United States of America. When asked why so many local Black, Indigenous, and People of Color-led initiatives seem to be thriving in Spokane right now, Luc has an immediate answer: “Necessity. Survival.” After pausing for a moment, he adds: “But the work we need to do here cannot happen without allies. I think the thing that excites me most about Spokane Word is the opportunity to magnify this work for those who might not know about it, to reach the folks that are feeling alone right now, the folks that are feeling directionless, and giving them something that they can tap into that will help them feel safe and welcome.” After many years of building towards this moment, the station is now ready to be a friendly voice even on the darkest of days, saying hello in listeners’ mother tongues, whatever they may be.