“I think that the two funding losses really helped us dig deeper into the community and become a community-owned station. And I think that’s fantastic.”
My first day was January 4. It’s been a fun few weeks. It’s exciting, and there’s definitely a lot to learn because I don’t have an extensive background in radio. I’ve worked for a radio program before as executive director, but never running a whole station. So there’s been a very steep learning curve. Luckily the people who are there, they’re so talented and they’ve been there for 25 years. They just need me to go raise money, and that’s what I like to do.
The interim part is just helping navigate that transition in a healthy way that helps give advice to how to shift gears between executive directors, especially when somebody’s been there for a long time. It’s good to test the waters with someone else for a little while. I think interim protects from rebound relationships, if you will. It works in churches that way too, where you have an interim person step in for a period of time and help the staff and the church transition away from that previous leadership and learn new leadership styles and get used to someone else being in charge, or just being there. If you’ve had somebody who’s been working there 16 years, that’s a lot of history. It’s helping the organization work through the leadership transition in a way that isn’t just going a complete 180 against the other person, but really paving the way for a transition.
They’ve stated that they’d like me to stay on, and they would like to see me be permanent. But because we’ve had so much financial transition in 2025, they wanted to make sure that KWBU was stable financially before they made the decision to bring in a permanent president and CEO.
Finances are really, really strong because the community had a tremendous response to KWBU’s cry for funding to help us stay on the air. We had a $315,000 pledge drive in September. Our goal was $300,000. The goal in December was $200,000, and we made $163,000. And those goals are so much higher than goals that they’ve ever had previously. Usually, they’re looking at a $75,000 pledge drive or a $10,000 pledge drive. We’re not out of the woods yet. We still need to raise about $350,000 before the end of our fiscal year in May.
2025 was a shock for everybody, I think. Baylor had a significant level of cutbacks across the entire university. All departments were experiencing significant levels of cuts to their funding. KWBU was told that we were going to lose our cash funding from Baylor, but not our in-kind funding. I think that’s an important distinction to make with the Baylor funding, because they are so incredibly generous with us, with our facilities, with our technology. They support us with a staff member. There’s a lot that they do to invest in KWBU. The relationship is still a very vital one for KWBU and continues to be and will be. But that cash cut that the university saw across the map affected KWBU as a part of one of the department’s budgets, and that was a big hit for us. And then right on the heels of that cut came the federal cut that happened in April. That was the cut to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. The federal funds were completely eliminated from those programs and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting is the one that feeds funds to the stations that support NPR and PBS. So across the nation, all of these stations saw that funding completely vanished overnight in terms of funding just for NPR and PBS. Well, our station relied heavily on both of those two sources.
Consequently, what happened, because we lost two major sources of funding within three months, we became one of the most at-risk stations in the nation, is what I found out over the last few weeks. On a list for all the stations in the nation, we were in the top 10 of the stations that were most in danger of completely shutting down because of the two large losses at the same time. That’s when we started going, ‘You know, OK, we’ve got to persist differently. We’ve got to become community funded.’ That’s what they sought out to do, and I think it worked. I think that the two funding losses really helped us dig deeper into the community and become a community-owned station. And I think that’s fantastic. I think it makes for a good future for all of us that there’s opportunities in the future to regain some funding here and there, but that the fact is that KWBU is meant to be a community station.
Lydia Tate was named the interim executive director and president of KWBU, 103.3-FM, on January 4. Her predecessor, Joe Riley, was the president and CEO of KWBU for nearly 17 years.
Previously, Tate was executive director of Christian Women’s Job Corps of McLennan County for more than five years. She graduated from Houston Baptist University — which is now Houston Christian University — with degrees in music and education. She is also the worship pastor at Chalk Bluff Baptist Church, where her husband, Dr. David Tate, is the pastor. He is also director of the online certificate program at Truett Seminary.
