CHUO interim station manager Geneviève-Isabelle Racine (front row, third from left) and countless other CHUO volunteers accept the 2001 Standard Award for starting a national initiative in the c/c radio sector.

"The best homegrown product" award: "I think it was when I came back from Halifax in 1999," recalls Geneviève-Isabelle Racine of CHUO 89.1 FM, who won the National Initiatives award for Le Grand Cru, an annual conference of Francophone campus stations. While attending the National Campus/Community Radio Conference (NCRC) in Halifax, Racine noticed how truly unique her station was: CHUO, located in the nation's capital, was fully bilingual. "The Anglophone part was benfitting from the NCRC, and I felt the French side could get some new ideas." Hence the idea for Le Grand Cru, the first of which Racine organized in March 2000. Le Grand Cru, roughly translated as "the best of the locally-made," connected five Francophone stations in Québec and Ontario that may not have come together otherwise. Alongside the conference itself, Le Grand Cru showcased local talent in a live gig and in a friendly DJ tournament. Resulting from the first conference was the formation of the Coalition des radios universitaires (CRU), a national organization with the goal of bringing together French and English-language campus stations in a Francophone network.