KSVY is a non-commercial station operated by Sonoma Valley Communications. The 501 (c) (3) organization says the station is funded entirely by listener contributions, grants and sponsor underwriting and receives no funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
The station was first heard in February 2004. It was launched by The CommondBond Foundation, the brainchild of Bill Hammett. Hammett, the president of the telecommunications engineering firm co-founded by his father, was seeking a way to bring together the disparate communities of Sonoma County.
He spent nearly ten years pursuing the FM license as part of his goal of trying “to help bridge the gap between the neighboring Hispanic and Anglo cultures here in the Sonoma Valley,” in Hammett’s words. The same year that KSVY launched with an all-volunteer staff, Hammett started two weekly newspapers: The Sun in English and El Sol in Spanish.
In late 2016, KSVY’s license was transferred from The CommonBond Foundation to Sonoma Valley Community Communications, a new independent nonprofit specifically created to operate community media in the Sonoma Valley.
With studios a few blocks west of the downtown Sonoma Square and a transmitter in the hills southwest of Sonoma, the station’s potential audience was originally quite limited. The signal was boosted in 2021 with the erection of a new tower above Stage Gulch Road. This move was made after the station’s broadcasts played a role during the devastating 2017 Sonoma County wildfires. Following the expansion of the station’s signal area to an estimated 450 square miles, KSVY became a part of the Sonoma Valley emergency communications plan, helping to keep residents abreast of wildfires and other emergencies.
The station’s programming in the mid-2020s remained an eclectic mix with all-volunteer hosts, some of whom had been with the station since its inception.
