Mission Statements

Greek American Educational Public Information System, Inc. (GAEPIS)

To preserve and promote Hellenic heritage through educational programs, events, and activities.

Hellenic Public Radio – COSMOS FM

To advance GAEPIS’s mission of preserving and promoting Hellenic heritage through bilingual, quality audio programming — produced mostly by volunteers and broadcast through public radio in New York and through web-based technologies worldwide.

Our Goals

By providing quality, bilingual audio content through COSMOS FM, GAEPIS aims to increase awareness of, and deepen the connection with, the common Hellenic heritage shared by the multi-generational Greek-American community — while promoting a deeper understanding and appreciation of all things Greek: news, events, ideas, and the arts.

We have three overarching goals:

1. Preserve and pass it on. To preserve, promote, and relay our Hellenic heritage to the next generation of Greek-Americans.
2. Reach further, on every platform. To attract a wider, more diverse audience — in both listenership and membership — within the Greek-American community of the Tri-State area and beyond, as well as within Philhellenic circles of society, with particular attention to engaging the younger generation of Greek-Americans on the platforms where they already spend their time. We use every available technology to carry this Hellenic voice to the widest possible audience.
3. Reflect our community. To evolve COSMOS FM’s overall programming to better reflect the people, stories, achievements, and struggles of our community, the Hellenic diaspora, and Greece.

About Us

Hellenic Public Radio – COSMOS FM (HPR) broadcasts under the aegis of the Greek American Educational Public Information System, Inc. (GAEPIS), a not-for-profit media and educational organization dedicated to preserving and promoting Hellenic heritage in the United States through the media of mass communication.

Founded in 1987, GAEPIS was established to serve the Hellenic-American community in all its diversity — from recent immigrants from Greece and Cyprus to Americans of Hellenic descent and Philhellenes alike. It began as a unique experiment: a Hellenic radio station built on the model of national public radio, something that had never been tried before.

GAEPIS identified public radio as the most effective way to realize its mission. Radio is widely and inexpensively accessible, and it meets audiences’ demand for timely, up-to-date reporting. Just as importantly, public radio offers independence from any agendas advertisers or political entities may have, ensuring unrestricted coverage of the issues that concern our community. This public channel exists solely to serve the interests of the community as a whole.

Hellenic Public Radio – COSMOS FM is the only daily, bilingual, non-commercial Greek radio program in the New York Metropolitan Area. With more than 5,000 supporting members, HPR reaches over 200,000 Hellenic and non-Hellenic listeners each week.

COSMOS FM broadcasts 13 hours of programming per week — 676 hours annually — across more than 20 distinct programs in Greek and English. Our programming spans local, national, and international news; news from Greece and Cyprus; and coverage of politics, science, social issues, religion, health, finance, music, the arts, sports, and community affairs.

The majority of our programs are produced by volunteers who work diligently to bring our listeners programming of the utmost quality. Our operating expenses are covered by sponsorships and by the generosity of our active listener-members, through two on-air membership drives held each year, as well as various fundraising events and functions.

While radio remains the flagship of our efforts, we are continually expanding into other media and technologies — including podcasting, vodcasting, online news, and community outreach.

GAEPIS/COSMOS FM was, in fact, a pioneer in web-based broadcasting as early as the 1990s, in cooperation with the MIT Media Lab. Today, we broadcast 24/7 online alongside our FM programming.

The dedication of our volunteers and the generosity of our sponsors and members are the cornerstones of this unique experiment.

Our Story: A Voice That Took Root in America

From our parents’ radio to our children’s media.

It began in 1987 with just two hours of airtime a week — arguably the two most consequential hours in the history of Greek presence on American radio, though no one could have known it at the time.

A small group of Greek-Americans, people with vision and a deep love for Hellenic culture, founded a non-profit organization in New York — the Greek American Educational Public Information System, Inc. — with a modest but ambitious goal: not just another radio show, not two hours of music to pass the time, but a permanent, dignified voice for the homogeneia on public radio. A voice that would inform, but also connect — culturally, socially, emotionally.

The 1980s were a period of transition for the Greek-American community: a first generation of immigrants growing older, a second finding its footing in American life, and a third often growing up far from the language and customs of their parents’ homeland. Radio was the most accessible bridge back to Greece that existed.

Nothing was guaranteed in those early broadcasts. Producers brought in their own records and cassette tapes. Some recorded after their day jobs; others woke before dawn to make it to the studio. But the answer came quickly, and it came from the community itself — phones ringing from the very first broadcasts, even from listeners who’d stumbled onto the frequency by accident and found something that reached them: a voice, a song, a greeting in Greek.

That relationship between listeners and producers is what gave the station its first breath of life. Four hours became six, then eight, then thirteen — a steady, organic growth built entirely on community support, without which those original two hours might well have stayed just two hours.

What began as a handful of volunteers filling airtime became something the community itself came to depend on.

More Than a Broadcast — A Mirror

Since 1987, COSMOS FM has stood witness to the full arc of the Greek-American experience in New York: the rise of Greek entrepreneurship in the city, waves of newcomers arriving in search of opportunity, the crises Greece weathered from abroad, and the ongoing struggle of schools and organizations to keep language and identity alive across generations.

The station has functioned as a living mirror of the community — surfacing stories and problems that might otherwise go unheard, giving a platform to people without access to larger media, and preserving a communal memory. Because a community without a voice fades. A community with a voice renews itself.

Global Reach, Ancient Roots

Today, listeners tune in daily not just from the New York metro area but from Europe, Australia, Canada, Greece, and countries with no Greek community at all — in truth, from every continent and ocean — a young person in California, a retiree in Queens, a sailor somewhere in the Atlantic, all sharing the same broadcast.

We see this not as a break from tradition but as its continuation. Long before microphones, studios, or airwaves, there was the orator in the ancient agora, the town crier delivering news by voice, the herald announcing events to a crowd at the hippodrome. What we do today with microphones and digital platforms, a distant ancestor did in the agora thousands of years ago — driven by the same human need to communicate, to inform, to connect.

Looking Ahead

The station’s future isn’t just continuation — it’s a question we take seriously: how does the Greek voice stay alive for the generations to come? As always, the answer lies with the community. As long as the homogeneia supports this effort — with time, presence, participation, sponsorship and resources — this voice will never fall silent.

It didn’t begin as a business. It began as an offering.

It doesn’t run on profit — it runs on meraki. And that, more than anything, may be the secret to why it has lasted.