As 2025 comes to a close, we at Lumpen Radio want to thank you for another amazing year! 

 

2025 has been a transformative year for Lumpen Radio, one driven by community knowledge, artistic collaboration, collective joy, and resistance. We are endlessly grateful to our hosts, DJs, volunteers, partners, and listeners for tuning in, showing up, and helping us amplify the voices and cultures that make Chicago thrive.

 

This year, we continued to push the boundaries of what community radio can be:  a classroom, a gathering place, a neighborhood newsroom, and a stage for free expression. We launched 17 new shows, series, and partnerships, fresh and returning voices. Many of these spotlight histories and sounds from across Chicago’s diverse immigrant, queer, and artist-run communities. From music shows like Future Rootz, An African Abroad, Ragas & Talas Radio, Potencia Sonidera, and Squaremix; to a variety of talk shows such as Preserving Disorder, noseyAF, Not in Distress, Frontline Youth, Cinematic Interventions, South Asia On The Air, and PeriFeral. Our limited series included The Memory Project in partnership with the Southside Weekly and a national partnership with Queer In Your Ear Productions and their podcast series Good Fences Make Good Neighbors — or do they? Our multilingual programming expanded with Impulsiones Alteradas, Lucha por tus derechos, Chicago and Boletín Migrante, Chango Snakedog al aire, our first puppet show for kids, blending playful storytelling, sound, and community voices.

 

Our Lumpen Specials kept highlighting urgent movements and cultural histories — including Garbage Transmissions and SACRED GROUNDS, GOSPEL SOUNDS — while Deep Cuts brought Thursday night DJ community to Life on Marz Community Club, and we aired unforgettable live sets like Damon Locks: List of Demands and a producer open-aux showcase with Murs + Good Chaos at Co-Prosperity Sphere.

 

2025 also saw radio out in the streets, studios, galleries, and beyond, with our radio recording booth such as The Art of Pride: Community Storytelling at Hyde Park Art Center celebrating Chicago’s LGBTQ+ voices; Boletín Migrante at Sazonblea, connecting frontline organizers across Mijente’s nationwide network; and MDW Itasca, sharing open-studio conversations from a rural arts gathering rooted in creative exchange and place-based resistance.

 

We also brought people together through hands-on workshops, public broadcasts, and intergenerational learning, including: Through Your Years: Generations on Air, a 5-week program in collaboration with Yollocalli Arts Reach where youth and elders recorded intimate oral histories about their lives and communities; Neighborhood Audio Portraits: Canaryville, a 4-day library takeover where CPL teen interns led interviews, research, and a live broadcast from the Canaryville Branch;  FM Waves to Activism, part of the HumanitiesX fellowship at DePaul University, a 10-week course culminating in live on-air premieres of student audio stories about activism across Chicago; VOZU: Megaphone Making, part of subVersion Summer Camp, turning old electronics into DIY sonic protest tools with sound artist Juanjose Rivas.

 

 

Our community journalism also grew stronger this year, Boletín Migrante continued twice-monthly reporting with Chicago Community & Workers’ Rights, breaking down immigration news while uplifting stories of resilience and collective power in Spanish. The Memory Project, a new radio + print collaboration with South Side Weekly through Alliance Matters initiative, documenting the voices of longtime Chicagoans.

 

Thank you to everyone who shared a mic, tuned in, organized with us, taught a workshop, or told a story this year. Together, we continue to build the media infrastructure our city deserves.

Onward to 2026 — more voices, more neighborhoods, more joy, more resistance.
Stay tuned. 📻⚡️