BUILDERS Interview: Matt Murphy on how community & music help him fight the paralysis of our times

<p><em>This is a Builders conversation. I'm doing these about once a month to highlight people who are not just cursing the darkness but are also </em><a href="https://jonward.substack.com/p/stories-of-the-builders" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"><strong><em>building</em></strong><em> up their local community</em></a><em> — and the country — through making something beautiful, through problem-solving, and by stitching together places of belonging and meaning.</em> <em>(Thank you </em><a href="https://jonward.substack.com/p/stories-of-the-builders" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"><em>Joy Moore</em></a><em> for the inspiration!)</em></p><p>This past summer, we took our kids to visit WERU in Maine, which is near Acadia National Park. The station's General Manager, Matt Murphy, gave us a tour, and he even had our two youngest daughters do a brief on-air announcement in support of the station. We saw the floor to ceiling shelves of CD's and records, the small studio, and the kitchen, also filled with music.</p><p>I wanted to interview Matt for my Builders series because, as he says: “There's so much in the world that's challenging ... and all the hard times can have a certain degree of paralysis to them."</p><p>"And there's a lot of things in the world that I can't do anything about, but I can do a lot about making community radio a good environment for people to do their thing and serve the community," he told me. "So having something to do, that you feel can help make even a little bit of a difference, is really important."</p><p>That's exactly it. Having something to do to make even a little bit of difference is the cure for the ways that the bigger, broader world can make all of us feel hopeless and powerless sometimes.</p><p>See Privacy Policy at <a href="https://art19.com/privacy" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">https://art19.com/privacy</a> and California Privacy Notice at <a href="https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">ht