North Ayrshire Council's 'Community Learning and Development' (CLAD) have withdrawn their promised funding to the Kilbirnie based community radio station, "Garnock Valley F.M." (GVFM).

After running an extremely popular, informative and entertaining 28 day broadcast in March-April 2008, the GVFM volunteers were asked by CLAD to form a committee in early summer 2008. This was with the intention of eventually taking over the running of the community based, health promoting radio station for themselves.

Office bearers were elected and the volunteers were keen to get involved in the actual running of the radio station, rather than 'just' making their own programmes. The whole project stalled due to a lack of direction from CLAD, followed by their instruction to the volunteers in October 2008 to 'get out of Radio City', and 'speak to Beith Community Centre' about accommodation there.

It was in January 2009 before a new co-ordinator from CLAD was put in place and the radio station volunteers were advised at this point that CLAD were providing the funding to run one 28 day broadcast. GVFM never asked CLAD for funding, it was freely offered by them without any approach to them.

The committee executive have been working hard to re-brand and promote the re-vamped radio station, while not being able to get most of the volunteers directly involved due to lack of premises, and the continual messing about by CLAD..

By May 2008, the radio station was ready to get everyone back together after moving the broadcasting equipment into a new studio, when the bombshell was dropped that the promised funding was 'no longer there'. The reason given was that there was a lack of interest from volunteers with a 'poor response' to a letter sent out by CLAD to them. The only thing about the letter was that none of the executive received it! On contacting a number of the volunteers, they had not received it either!

The committee were also advised that as the funding had not been spent by the end of the financial year, that the money could not be run-on into the new year. There was no indication that this was the case in January when the funding was first promised. It would have been impossible to set up the organisation, arrange premises, train volunteers and produce a 28 day broadcast before the end of March. For one thing, the licences would need to have been applied for in January if this had been the case, but you need an address to run a radio station. This was not confirmed until late April 2009.

GVFM Chairman, Iain Walker, tried to get assistance from CLAD in sourcing further funding only to be advised to speak to another department within NAC. The CLAD worker refused a request for help in completing application forms for funding. Mr Walker stated, "we were not asking CLAD to fill the forms in for us, only to provide some guidance in their supposed expertise after they had withdrawn the promised funding". Mr Walker continued, "the whole thing left a 'bad taste' as I felt that CLAD were pulling away from providing any assistance to a project that they had apparently wanted. It all seemed to be 'stage managed'. Equipment had been removed from the studio without our knowledge and any involvement of CLAD workers was denied, only for the equipment to appear at another project run by the same CLAD workers. I am aware that there needs to be some pooled resources for projects run by the same department, but it needs the honesty of everyone involved. These community projects need trust between all of those involved, and I could no longer trust the CLAD workers. I have now resigned as Chairman of GVFM as I can no longer work with CLAD".

GVFM will continue to try to obtain funding from other sources and hope to hold a public meeting in the near future to gauge local support and involvement of volunteers.