About Radio Regen

Since 1999, Manchester-based charity Radio Regen has set up three full time community radio stations, trained hundreds in accredited courses and enabled more than 10,000 residents of disadvantaged areas of Manchester, Salford and the North West to get on air.  We now focus on innovative projects that help community stations in the UK and beyond to thrive and deliver their best to their communities.  There is no organisation like us in the UK.

Our second temporary station in North Manchester 2001.

Our ground-breaking experiment in how community radio tackles disadvantage and aids regeneration has included three full-time stations and more than 30 temporary Restricted Service Licence (RSL) broadcasts. These have been backed up by accredited training in radio production for local volunteers as well as art, youth and community development projects. We are also the proud creators and host of this site and that for the Connect Transmit project.

At Radio Regen we have been pioneers in this exciting new sector of the UK media. We gained two of the 16 Access Radio Pilot full-time licences with ALL FM 96.9 for Central, South and East Manchester and Wythenshawe FM 97.2 (WFM). These are staffed by volunteers from the broadcast areas who receive accredited training and are supported by a staff team. We also developed and launched North Manchester FM in 2010.  These stations are all independent and run by people and organisations in their areas.

Our focus now is to build upon our long experience to create resources for community radio stations to use, wherever they are, to improve what they do, better serve their communities and by doing so strengthen their business case.  Currently (2015) these include ‘Employment FM‘ – looking at employability and community radio training and a Social Media Toolkit for the sector.

We have run projects that look at audience research, training delivery and commissioned various articles for this site.  Our largest recent project was Connect:Transmit which examined how community radio training delivered speaking and listening skills to under-19 year olds.  The site contains a wealth of resources for stations already delivering or seeking to deliver such training.

At Radio Regen we believe that community radio delivers skills, builds community spirit and connects communities to the agencies tasked to serve them in a way that no other tool can. Over our eleven years we have formed partnerships with local housing associations, health organisations, councils, refugee groups and schools amongst others.

For many years we delivered a range of accredited training at our HQ and at community stations with The Manchester College. This training has now been taken in house and details can be found here.

We have also been pivotal in securing political support for the introduction of community radio across the UK. Our Community FM conferences in Manchester in 2004, 2005 and 2007 helped would-be licensees develop their station concepts and apply for licences for forthcoming start-ups.

There are now over 200 full time stations live across the UK and as well as continuing to build our wealth of knowledge we are delivering the first UK qualitative community radio research pilot and developing our consultancy services.

Radio Regen

46 Oldham Street, Green Fish Resource Centre, Manchester, M4 1LE

Registered Charity No 1077763

Company Ltd by Guarantee Registered in England and Wales No 3753832