'Don’t have time to drain the swamp; too busy dealing with alligators’: defining the governance skills sets that enhance volunteer retention and recruitment in small arts and cultural organisations

Small arts and cultural organisations are facing a number of significant challenges through the ongoing austerity programmes impacting on their funding and practices. These challenges are made more complex and problematic through the isolation and time poverty they experience as a result of small budgets, less paid staff and through primarily volunteer run governance. There is a contradiction in inherent in the importance of recruiting and retaining volunteers and the on-going capacity of volunteer governance. This paper seeks to identify and explore these tensions and contradictions by identifying governance skills sets that can support the volunteer function, and inform a training process that is practice-based and overcomes the limitations of isolation, funding and time

Programming community radio within a fractured suburbia: an action research study of access and programming participation of urban sub-cultures

Encouraging grassroots access to community media is one the fundamental tenets of any responsible community media organisation, and is imperative to the survival of the community media sector as a whole. Access and participation have supported the growth and development of community media as a citizen-owned medium. This paper will present three models for identifying new and emerging cultural and sub-cultural groups within sub-urban communities and determine modes and motivations of participation within broadcasting. It will also discuss mechanisms needed to ensure that suburban communities, which exist within a wider, perhaps more dominant suburbia have the necessary skills, access and resources to create their own media. The theoretical aspect will be supported by case studies of each model as tested at2RRR, a community radio station located in the suburbs of Sydney, which has been active in encouraging innovative forms of grassroots participation over the past five years

Build it and they will come: a case study of the impacts of governance on programming volunteer recruitment within community media organisations

Volunteer recruitment to functions such as programming is imperative to the survival of the majority of community media organisations. These functions are embedded in the regulatory and 'custom and practice' environments in which community stations in Australia operate. The structures in which policies and processes for programming volunteer recruitment are developed are complex and frequently volunteer-led. Within the context of developing these processes for a suburban community radio station in a major capital city of Australia, a participatory action research project was conducted longitudinally over five years to identify the positive and negative impacts that governance may have on the recruitment of programming volunteers. Three years after the completion of the action research project, we undertook a post-project analysis that identified an active dismantling of the policies and processes almost immediately after the project finished, a continued shift towards hierarchical decision-making and the observable impact of skills shortages within a volunteer board. The project also exposed significant ideological fractures that had lasting effects on the station and its role as a community voice