The National Federation of Community Broadcasters (NFCB) is a nonprofit membership organization of nearly 200 community radio stations in the United States. Community stations are independent, nonprofit organizations and their broadcast service is noncommercial. These stations are governed, operated, and financially supported by people in the communities they serve. They provide opportunities for individuals, groups, and communities to tell their own stories and celebrate their own culture. Their programming is often a blend of hyperlocal focus and global sensibilities, mixing news, public affairs, music, and cultural expression.

Community volunteers play significant roles in creating programming and providing behind the scenes support to community radio stations. Most stations complement their broadcasts with online streaming and other digital services, as well as by sponsoring local events such as concerts and issue forums. Most do not have budgets that allow them to join the NPR network or carry national news magazines.

Over half of NFCB's member stations serve small, rural communities in which they are often the only locally controlled daily media and the only source of local news. Others work in larger urban areas and focus on communities that are otherwise not well-reflected in the commercial radio marketplace. These commitments are challenging and constrain the resources of most community radio stations. More than 6 in 10 NFCB members report annual budgets under $100,000.

NFCB has served community stations since 1975 and is the oldest and largest national organization dedicated to community stations within the public media system. Over its 50 years of service, NFCB has helped to:

NFCB's support for its members includes hosting in-person gatherings at regional summits and a biennial national conference.

NFCB was founded in 1975 after decades of growth in the community radio industry inspired largely by two iconoclastic broadcast activists in the San Francisco Bay Area: Lewis Hill, who founded the Pacifica network of radio stations in California in the late 1940s, and Lorenzo Milam, who founded a series of community radio stations across the country in the early 1960s.

In 1971 Milam self-published Sex and Broadcasting, which offered a comprehensive step-by-step guide to licensing, financing, building and operating a community station. The opening lines clearly reflected Milam's irreverent approach to the industry: "Broadcasting as it exists now in the United States is a pitiful, unmitigated whore. At some stage in its history, there was a chance to turn it to a creative, artful, caring medium; but then all the toads came along, realizing the power of radio and television to hawk their awful wares."

In June 1975, staff and volunteers from existing and soon-to-launch community stations, along with community radio aspirants and organizers – some 75 in all – convened the first National Alternative Radio Konference (NARK). At the conclusion of the gathering the attendees generally agreed that it was time for coordinated national activities to accelerate and support the growing field.