Empowering Kindness: Four Years on the Air

Every week since 2021, Sam Sinjari has hosted Empowering Kindness on AM800 CKLW — an independent community program he created to spotlight local charities, non-profits and the people quietly holding Windsor-Essex together. It is the longest-running thing he does, and the clearest window into how he thinks about public life.

What is Empowering Kindness?

It is an independent weekly program on AM800 CKLW, created and hosted by Sam Sinjari, spotlighting community leaders, non-profits, and initiatives that deliver measurable impact. The premise is simple enough to explain in a sentence: most of the good done in a region never makes the news.

The volunteer who has run the same food drive for eleven years. The coach who keeps a rink open. The neighbour who checks on the same three houses every winter. That work is invisible almost by design, because the people doing it are not doing it for attention. Empowering Kindness gives it a microphone.

Why radio, and why weekly?

Weekly is the hard part. Anyone can do a good thing once. Showing up every week for more than four years — booking the guest, preparing the questions, being in the chair — is a different kind of commitment, and it is the same one Sam has brought to donating work shoes, buying Thanksgiving turkeys, and serving on community boards.

Local radio matters here too. AM800 reaches people across Windsor-Essex who are not on social media and do not read press releases: seniors, shift workers, farmers, people in the car between jobs. A program about neighbourliness belongs on the medium neighbours actually share.

What it has to do with being Mayor

Four years of interviewing people about their communities is four years of listening to what a region needs, from the people closest to it. That is not a campaign skill; it is a governing one. A mayor’s job is largely to hear clearly, ask the next question, and give credit where it belongs — a fair description of what the program has been doing since 2021.

It is also a matter of temperament. Someone who has spent four years building a platform for other people’s good work tends to run a Town Hall the same way.

Where Sam Sinjari stands

Sam intends to keep telling these stories. Lakeshore has its own quiet volunteers — in Belle River, Comber, Stoney Point and every hamlet between — and recognising them publicly costs the taxpayer nothing. (Campaign position.)

Sources: AM800 CKLW; Empowering Kindness with Sam Sinjari (samsinjari.com), airing weekly since 2021.