Earlier this month, Senators and Representatives packed up their bags and returned home for August recess, but, before they left, they made critical decisions about public media funding.

 
Here’s what they’ve decided so far:

The House and Senate Appropriations Committees approved their respective Fiscal Year (FY) 2017 Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education Appropriations Bills, which both include funding for:

• The Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which provides essential seed money for local public television and radio stations
• Ready To Learn, a competitive grant program that funds proven-effective educational children’s content (It’s funded programs like Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood, Odd Squad, Peg + Cat and more.)
• Interconnection, an infrastructure program that ensures all households continue to have access to public media’s programming and emergency communications services.

These results were made possible by viewers and listeners like you who sent hundreds of emails to key lawmakers to protect the public media funding that enables your stations to provide you with your favorite programming and essential services. We can’t thank you enough for your outreach.

Next, the House and Senate could meet to put together a compromise spending bill, a final bill that irons out the differences between each chamber’s version of the bill. We’ll let you know if we need you to raise your voice during this process to make sure that public media funding is protected.

Even though we’re celebrating a major victory today, it’s important that we’re ready for the next potential challenge. Here’s how you can help:

• Make sure that you’re signed up to be an official Protect My Public Media advocate. You can sign up on the right-hand side of this page, and we will let you know when and how to speak up for your stations.
• Ask the public media fans in your life to sign up, too. You can share this blog with them on many platforms, including email, by using the share icons at the top of this page.
• Tells us why you listen or watch on our testimonial page here. The more testimonials we collect, the better we can tell public media’s story to Congress.

 
Together, we’re going to protect public media for future generations to enjoy.Thanks for taking a stand for the local stations and programs you love and being an important part of the public media family.