CBAA is pleased to announce the latest addition to our board – Jessica Tapp. Jessica comes to the board with extensive experience in multimedia journalism and production with the ABC, and in communications and media management in the not-for-profit and government sectors, particularly in the Northern Territory. Jessica is the Community Voice Manager at Port Macquarie Hastings Council.
Joining the CBAA board provides an excellent opportunity for Jessica to connect with her background as a broadcaster as well as give back to community broadcasting as a sector, which has served the communities she worked with in New South Wales, Victoria and the Northern Territory.
Connection to community and country are important to Jessica, who is a proud Aboriginal woman. Jessica seeks to champion the voices of diverse, rural, First Nations and migrant communities in her work.
We spoke to her to find out more about her professional background, interest in community media and, of course, her dream community radio show.
What motivated you to join the CBAA board?
I was really looking for the opportunity to give back to that world. A lot of the work that I had done in the Northern Territory was around emergency management, we relied so heavily on the community broadcasters to do that.
And I’ve always had a public service mentality as well. Where can you give back? And where can you help your community? Whether it’s your immediate local community, or broader community.
There’s also the sense of being grounded in communities that are made up of local people, who have this interest and want to tell their stories and focus on the hyperlocal.
It’s a real strength of community broadcasting that I’m looking forward to getting to see and experience and support through this role.
What perspective do you think your background brings to the board?
What’s really been helpful is looking at processes and systems and what that adherence to regulation can look like in a much more structured and departmental environment. But then also the need to be agile depending on the work you might be doing with ministers or councillors.
It’s interesting because the last job I had in the Territory before I moved to New South Wales was with a not for profit, but it had been created in this really interesting way.
It was an independent research institute, but it also had an education component.
It was a body corporate, but it had been established under a government act.
So, there was a level of accountability to the relevant Minister and that’s been really helpful looking at what those processes are in the machinery of government, but also when you’re on the other side and you need to talk to government and advocate or have conversations with them.
What do you think of the role that community radio has to play in amplifying less heard voices?
There’s the phrase if you can’t see it, then you can’t be it. That gets used a lot in community and it’s really important for people to be able to see and hear at a higher profile level, people that look like them or sound like them and have the ability to then connect and for that information to really resonate.
If you don’t have access to those sorts of channels, it can make it a lot harder to really connect and feel like you are part of a community.
I think it’s really important to celebrate Australia’s diversity as well, to celebrate and highlight those differences that we have because it is a rich cultural tapestry.
You are offered a radio show – you can have any timeslot, play whatever music you like, discuss whatever you feel is of interest – what is happening today on the Jessica Tapp Variety Hour Radio Show?
If it was me here, either on Larrakia Country (where we spoke to Jessica for this interview), or back where I normally am on Biripi land, we’d have Gathang language spoken, we already would have had a chat with an Elder and a language teacher as well because you can’t move forward if you don’t know your history.
We would have had a whole segment of skip hop. We also probably would have had a real mix of country in there as well. Australian music for the win!
And then I think we’d be having a chat with some of our up and comers from the local high school, in a ‘This Is Your Community’ news segment. Maybe wrap up with some gardening too.
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Thanks to Jessica for taking the time to chat with the CBAA team, and we look forward to working with her as a member of the board for years to come. Visit this page if you want to get to know the rest of the CBAA board and its observers.