Jenn, let's talk about what comes next.

- Yes.

- So you've said WTVP does not expect federal funding to return, at least not anytime soon.

The We Believe in WTVP campaign helped carry this station through the past year and the response from central Illinois has been remarkable, but that's not a gap that can be solved in a single year.

So as WTVP looks ahead, how do we continue building that partnership with the community and create a sustainable path forward together?

- Yes, so I love that you were, you used that phrase, sustainable path, because that is what we are building.

And as you said, that gap does not go away overnight.

When you lose 30% of a historic source of your funding, what we're doing is we're trying to replace 30%, but it doesn't happen overnight.

Last year's campaign was hugely successful.

Now we're going to be building on that momentum and launching today a brand new campaign called, WTVP, Stronger Together.

Stronger Together is all about building on the momentum that we started last year.

As, you know, Andy was talking about the spark, the fire that got started, right?

We had great momentum.

We have great momentum, but it's not a one-year campaign.

This is literally building the next 25 years of public media in central Illinois.

And we have a chance to do it really well because of how successful last year was.

Last year we brought in 2,500 new donors, and we brought in a million dollars.

This year, our goal through the WTVP Stronger Together campaign is to raise $600,000 and to equal that number of new donors.

So, it's going to be a lot of, it's gonna be a lot of work.

It's gonna require a lot of continued lean in from the community.

But again, I'm just so excited about what we're going to be able to do together.

And it goes both ways, right?

Like WTVP exists, we are stronger because of the community that supports us.

But our community is stronger because they have a resource, like public media.

- Absolutely.

- And as a parent with young children, I say this to myself every day.

If we did not have public media as a safe, trusted source for reliable educational, quality programming, what would my kids watch?

This is something that's critical for our community.

It's also a clean source of connecting people to what's going on in central Illinois.

We do that better than anyone else.

And we're just dynamically excited about the future.