Community Participation: An Overview

For a community radio station to truly reflect its community, it means beginning a dialogue with them long before it reaches the airwaves. It means actively going out and recruiting volunteers of all ages and ethnicities. And it means running projects to encourage participation by everyone from primary schools and refugee groups to youth centres, luncheon clubs for the elderly and housing associations.

"If the community has a sense of ownership of something at the beginning then it's more likely to succeed," says former Radio Regen Community Participation Manager Cath Bates. "If you're sitting down thinking 'I think it'd be a good thing to set up a community station' the first thing you should do is begin a consultation process with local people about the idea, and ask them what they'd like to see to help shape their station."

Once your station is up and running, pro-actively promoting community participation should be an ongoing process says David Armes, ALL FM Community Participation Officer. "It's about identifying which parts of the community aren't represented on the station - say that there isn't a Pakistani show, or there's only limited Irish content - and trying to find routes into those communities to get them involved in the station if they want to be. This means directly approaching groups within those communities, whether statutory or voluntary. We simply ask if they'd like to turn whatever it is they do into radio. This could range from us making a trailer to them having a regular slot. It could mean me making a feature with them or them eventually having an hour or two-hour show."

Youth projects have proved a particular hit. In 2003, WFM and Remix The Streets worked with a group of young women from Benchill's BESS youth project to make a magazine show. Over in Longsight, ALL FM ran a radio summer school at the Anson Cabin project, an informal after-school play centre for children on the Anson estate. "We got funding to run a series of summer workshops which culminated in a live radio show. The kids really loved it, they got loads out of it and the show sounded brilliant," says David.

Meanwhile, Cath says the role of community participation officer is also to work with existing community groups on initiatives they're already involved with. As an example she cites WFM's collaboration with Wythenshawe Domestic Violence Forum. The station highlighted the issue with a week of special features including interviews with professionals and survivors complemented by poetry and drama. "Calls to the Domestic Violence Helpline from the Wythenshawe area saw a significant increase during and after the broadcast, so the results of that within the community were real and measurable," she says.