COMMUNITY RADIO PROJECT

Matt MacDonald had a full-time job as a lecturer in Community Enterprise for the Business & Community Enterprise Unit, a department at St Martin’s College, Lancaster. He taught a course called ‘Capacity Building and Social Entrepreneurship’ – typically to charity managers. The College is offering a new course; the ‘Radio Production Foundation Degree’, which is equivalent to a foundation year. As Matt has been involved in several radio projects, he was seconded for 2 days per week to ‘explore radio’, and in the course of his exploration he discovered that:
1. OffCom, the government licensing authority, are proposing to grant Community Radio licenses
2. North West Brain, a funding body, is encouraging higher education institutions to take their knowledge and make it available to surrounding communities, with special emphasis on both IT and Communication.

Visits were made to Radio Regen in Manchester (a pilot community radio station) and Unity FM in Preston. Earlier this year Matt also attended an international community radio conference hosted by radio Regen, where he learned a lot. Out of knowledge gained so far, Matt put in a bid on behalf of his department at St Martin’s, to NW Brain, for funding for 2 community radio stations, one based in Lancaster/Morecambe, and one somewhere else, possibly Fleetwood.

The entire funding bid was for £132,000 (to be shared between both sites), and will be available, with St Martin’s holding the money, after the College signs a contract, which has not been finalised yet but is likely to contain the following:

· To recruit volunteers and train them in a range of skills needed for community radio
· To set up radio production facilities at both sites
· To apply for a restricted service licence (RSL), which means a 1 month broadcast licence
· To evaluate that 1st month of broadcast
· To work with the volunteers to form a new social enterprise (ie a trading business with social and charitable aims), so that they (the volunteers) can make and sign a constitution, identify funding, and make a business plan
· To mentor that group to the point where they can apply for a community radio license and run the station.

What is the money for?

4 posts:
· A full time project manager
· A half-time volunteer co-ordinator
· A half-time technical station manager
· A 3-day a week administrator
Also:
Funds will be allocated for equipment at both sites:
ie sound desk, transmitter, computers & software, minidisks, mics, etc.
Also:
Licences (1 per site)
+ premises rental

NB St Martin’s will also charge a management fee for administering the bid.

To find out more about community radio, look on the internet – there’s a really interesting one called Bush FM, from S. Africa, which started life as a pirate and is now involved in trans-world training schemes etc.

The project is being set up in collaboration with Lancaster YMCA


WEB RADIO PROJECT

A separate project which will mesh with the community radio project. Toby Weymouth ( DJ: The Whip, Acmebass) was a music technology and IT teacher at White Cross Adult College, Lancaster.
Web radio is of course only available with access to a computer and the internet - but by these means the radio output is available world-wide.

Ideas for programmes are being invited from groups and individuals in the community.

It won’t be 24/7 live at first, but listeners will be able to access stored programs as they wish, as well as listen to live on-line every evening, hours yet to be decided.

These are the links and salient points:

The Web Radio Project is very good way of generating and banking programme content and will be much more accessible when it can go out as FM when the Community Radio gets off the ground.

The community training project is intended to provide free training to web radio volunteers. A central purpose of all the projects is to generate professional broadcasting and associated skills in the local population in an accessible format that is not necessarily college-based. It should be possible to link with studios in several locations, including, for example, Lancaster YMCA, to generate different types of programming and also to develop mobile studio facilities.

A ‘bank’ of short programs can be developed for use by both the Web-based and the FM stations.