Get To Know Us: Dave Houchin

Currently Station Manager at Melbourne's 3RRR, Dave Houchin has experience working in metro and sub-metro community broadcasters in Victoria and Western Australia, starting as a volunteer presenter in 2000.

Dave has been a not-for-profit CEO and Director since 2007. He is a graduate of the Australian Institute of Company Directors and holds Bachelors Degrees in Commerce and Arts. He has just recently joined the CBAA Board. 

Dave is passionate about the work of not-for-profits, independent media, music, arts, culture, education, community engagement, and public spaces.

Can you give us a rundown of your history and experience in and out of community radio? 
I started as a volunteer presenter at Murdoch Campus Radio in Western Australia in 1999 or 2000. I also had stints at Heritage FM and Radio Fremantle in Western Australia. After many volunteer applications, I ended up at RTR FM doing a Friday night hip hop show and working in sponsorship. When the Station Manager role came up, with some encouragement from my colleagues, I applied for it.  The Triple R Station Manager job was advertised a few years later, which meant a larger station and greater challenges, and I got to move back to Melbourne where I’m originally from. 
 
What motivated you to join the CBAA board? What are you most excited about? What are you hoping to achieve?
I love my work at Triple R, but I’m also starting to think about how I can use my station experience to benefit the sector more broadly. I was approached by the CBAA to join the board and it felt like it was a good opportunity to represent a metro Melbourne station and an educational and progressive part of the sector that was otherwise not currently represented on the CBAA Board. It’s also an interesting and pivotal time, with the new National Cultural Policy at a Federal level and the CBAA and Community Broadcasting Foundation’s 10-year Roadmap being introduced recently. 
 
What do you see as the key challenges for CBAA and the community radio sector in the coming years? 
A key challenge for the CBAA is around the huge diversity of the sector. There’s a real challenge in representing stations of all different sizes and value structures. For challenges in the sector in general, there are trends such as a downturn in volunteering and audience preferences for different ways of listening that create the need for digital transformation. I think the greatest challenge is ensuring that we’re engaging young people, to identify community broadcasting’s future audiences and workforce. I think we also need to get better at talking about our sector’s powerful impact and great value to the community. We need to be able to articulate that impact to different audiences, be they philanthropists, government or individual subscribers and donors. 
 
The Roadmap 2033's strategic priorities include Grow Our Capability, Celebrate Our Identity and Demonstrate Impact, Amplify Diverse Voices and Secure Capacity to Meet Community Needs. Which one of these resonates most with you and why? 
In addition to Celebrating our Identity and Demonstrating Impact, Amplifying Diverse Voices is an important one to me. Australia’s cultural landscape is always changing, and to remain relevant, our station communities need to representative of the changing population. We should be celebrating our diversity and always prioritising lived experience. There are stations in the sector who have done this incredibly well for decades, that the rest of us can learn from.
 
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 Dave Houchin Variety Hour Radio Show? 
I would start the show with a track by Cymande. They’re a British jazz funk band with Carribbean roots from the early 70s who I saw the other night at Northcote Theatre. 

I also just saw a play at the Melbourne Theatre Company called 37 so I would love to interview someone from that show, maybe the star Ngali Shaw who I also loved in the play Jacky last year too.

And finally, I think I’d have to address the atrocities happening overseas at the moment while being mindful of the hurt and division that's happening locally as well.