Employee Volunteer Highlight: Jalon Alexander
Business Development Associate, Jalon Alexander
Where do you volunteer?
I'm a board member at WESA, which is the Pittsburgh NPR public radio equivalent. It's public journalism for the city. We produce local music and non-partisan news.
I've done a lot of different things for them. Sometimes I help fundraise. That might mean phone banking or going to an event and participating in some of the entertainment. In the past I've danced with the entertainment we've hired. My job at events is to help convert attendees into subscribers. We're a non-profit government funded organization that has lost a lot of funding over the years through different administrations, so subscribers are crucial.
During COVID we had 50 employees and made sure we could keep them on. I was behind the scenes and helped come up with the budget strategy, such as what grants we should apply for. I'm proud to announce we didn't have to fire or lay off a single employee during the pandemic. It's really significant because these employees don't make a lot of money, but the work they do and stories they cover are significant.
These stories include: How the pandemic affected communities of color, how people were receiving mail-in ballots during pandemic, unfair tenant evictions, local artist promotion. We're really proactive with promoting diversity.
We exclusively promote artists in western PA and in the state, mostly artists that haven't made it big yet. We really engage with the community. We provide our shows free of charge and that's important to us to help artists gain exposure. Public radio has an important role in providing education and entertainment in the community. Our job is to do that in the most inclusive way.
My job as a board member is to make sure we do that responsibly behind the scenes. For example, during hiring we make sure that who we hire are diverse and representative of the population they're covering.
COVID has changed things because we no longer have in-person events. For example, I played jazz for 15 years of my life. I'm not a professional, but I like to play in public a lot. In the past, I would go to schools and volunteer with the music teachers to teach kids about music. Free of charge, I might teach a class on improvisation. Those are the types of things that board members used to do.
The way I got involved in public radio and jazz is that I grew up playing chess in the chess club. There was always jazz playing in the background. I fell in love with it. As an adult, when I got the opportunity to get involved with jazz and public radio, I took it. Jazz is a kind of dying art. It's not played as much and looked at as an older genre.
This is my way of staying involved and keeping the art form alive. If I can promote local artists and stay in tune to how jazz is being played on the radio, that's important to me. From a self serving perspective, I've met incredibly famous jazz musicians who have come through.
I see it as a way to stay connected and give back.
What do you enjoy most about it?
What I enjoy most is the economic impact on the communities. I take a lot of pride in influencing the directors and individuals to hire people who deserve jobs that might not be represented.
For example, we wanted to do a project on a particular community. We wanted to hire a group of consultants and academics to do the work. I made sure along with others that the people we hired came from those communities directly. Some of the reporters came from those areas. The consulting group, we made sure they were people of color of the group consulting was done for.
It's not an affirmative action thing. When you're talking about news literature and reporting, if you want accuracy, people need to talk to people they trust. If people get interviewed by people they don't trust, you wont' get accurate information. We owe it to them and we want to make sure that our study is accurate.
As much as I care about empowering artists, what I really like is giving people opportunities that they wouldn't have otherwise had. I think it's really empowering to pay people to accurately represent their social location.
Do you have any goals for the future with your volunteer work?
I would love to see more of an incubator that takes local artistically talented high school students and promotes them more frequently. I would love to see an hour or two built in once a week where we exclusively play high school artists or have more events for them.
Ultimately, every city has a Mozart or a Nina Simone or a Billy Holiday. But I don't think those individuals always have the opportunity to truly be that. I want to do what I can to promote them so Julliard can give them a scholarship, for example. I want them to go to art school and really achieve their dreams.
If public radio is public and we invest in the public, we need to do more to invest in the youth outside of public education.
Let's take Jay-Z for example. As a rapper and artist, he actually really didn't start until he was almost 30. What if so many people gave up because they weren't picked first or they didn't have the resources to be exposed? I hate seeing dreams and talent go to the wayside because they didn't have the exposure or resources.
I encourage everyone to pursue their dreams in the arts. Artists don't get worse when they get older. You age and mature like fine wine. That's why I still play jazz. I play because it has intrinsic spiritual and important value to me. For those people who do want to express their ideas to the world, I want to give them the opportunity to do that.
For some of the most important conversations and political debates, the catalyst has been arts and media. In the civil rights movement, the things Martin Luther King, Jr. wanted to achieve wouldn't have happened if the newspapers didn't report on how they got the hell beat out of them for advocating their rights.
“The best work is done relentlessly.”
Do you have any advice to people who would like to get involved in their communities but aren't sure where to start?
I would say that whatever it is you want to do to help the community, do it without permission. If you want to help people, you could google local organizations. But you don’t need to ask for permission to help. If you want to see a problem fixed, go to the problem and address it. You might not be able to create systemic change from the beginning.
If you know a kid who wants to be a comedian, something as simple as giving them a lesson or a conversation about how to pursue that.
The best advice I can give people is to be unapologetic and don't ask for permission to try to help others. There's no reason to wait to help people. I don't need to be elected to office to help people. The best work is done relentlessly.