Current Volunteers

WCR was an amazing place when I volunteered and going back after being in the USA for a year it has improved. The people are amazing and friendly. The whole staff supported whatever direction I wanted to take my show and always gave me good advice. The equipment is high quality and allowed me to do certain technical things with the show. The facilities are excellent. WCR had everything and more!...I am currently working in the United States working with musicians who listened and tuned into my radio show…For anyone who is interested in any type of media, WCR is definitely a place that can help!

I have gained confidence and greater communication skills. There are some great people to meet…staff are friendly and helpful. WCR has become more organised, has better training opportunities and has become more professional

My personal confidence has been boosted and realised what I learnt in the classroom I can put into practice and give me more confidence when applying for jobs. The fantastic practical experience has shown me what I need to improve on to stand a chance of working in the media industry. The skills I would have never had a chance to do before are operating a mixing desk, using digital editing programmes such as Cool Edit Pro and improving my presenting technique. I like having the freedom to express myself and ideas…and having excellent facilities, with vast training opportunities and friendly, knowledgeable staff who are always prepared to help. WCR gives people a fantastic opportunity to develop new and existing skills, its great for people who want to get a career in radio/media. With really professional studios that you wouldn’t the opportunity to use anywhere else.

I am very grateful for all of the opportunities that I have had because of my Foundation Degree. I have been a volunteer at WCRT since early2005. Since joining I have been a reporter, news reader and I presented my own show called the Packed Lunch. I also reported for the Wolverhampton Community Magazine which was broadcast on BBC WM, on Sunday evenings.

I absolutely loved working at WCR because I could put everything that I had been taught into practice. I was invited to go to music and beer festivals, official openings of medical centres (the Gem and Phoenix centres) and I would talk to the organisers of the events, and ask the public, what they thought about the events.

It has been an absolute privilege to report for WCR, because everywhere I went the people and organisations gave me unique access to areas where the general public were not usually permitted access to. For example when I interviewed David Bishop the cities Archivist, he gave me access to very important documents dating from the fifteenth century.

Working at WCR was a very humbling experience for me because I did not realise just how many people and organisation that were in the Wolverhampton area, that were doing really important work for charity. Parmi Dheensa is one of the founder members of "include me too" and she says their motto is “let’s change tomorrow for today's children and young people with disabilities, special needs, and for their families, enabling them to embrace a positive future". Meeting those kids and talking to their families was truly heart breaking, but all of the kids had huge smiles on their faces. And when they performed their song ‘Include me too’ it was breathtaking, and very emotional.

It was the same, when we met the representatives from Promised Dreams. They are an organisation which helps sick and terminally ill children by making one of their dreams become reality. At WCR we tried to give the unsung heroes of Wolverhampton the recognition that they disserved. And to let the people of Wolverhampton know that Wolverhampton is a great place to live and the people are also really great.

The work that I did at WCR meant a lot to me, and because I had gained all of the skills through my Foundation Degree. I could put those skills to good use in the community, and that was very satisfying and it gave me enormous confidence in myself.

When OFCOM finally granted WCR their FM licence I had to show my appreciation of WCR by making a video about the station. It had taken over twenty years for Pete Whitehouse to convince OFCOM to give WCR their FM licence.

Just before this, in July 2005, while WCR was still broadcasting its College service, OFCOM had granted WCR a short-term Restricted Service Licences or RSL. For this period I was offered the chance to join their News Team. I had read out recorded news items before, but this time we had to write, edit, record sound clips and read the news live on air. This was a great experience for me, because we interacted with the presenters and we were live on air. We made some mistakes but we were learning really quickly. The news would be read on the hour, this was a three minute bulletin, and on the half hour, which would be a one minute update.

On the morning of July the seventh, 2005, the day started normally. I got in around eight am, and prepared the first bulletin of the day. Everything was going great; we had a system for news gathering so we were always ready with the next bulletin. We were really pleased with the progress that we had made, and we started to sound quite good. At about nine twenty am, I was rehearsing the script for the nine thirty update, most of the guest speakers had talked about reading a script out loud, so that you could hear how the script sounded. Just before I went to go into the studio, I had a quick look on the computer, just to make sure that there were no breaking news stories. We had been using the IRN news service - Independent Radio News is the Main provider of news to the UK's commercial radio stations. There was nothing new, so I pressed the F5 key, to refresh the webpage. And there was a small piece about an explosion in London. There were no real details at that point in time, so at the end of the bulletin I said that there had been an explosion in London, we don’t have any details yet but we will keep you up to date in the ten o clock bulletin. It had been a stark contrast to that of a just one day earlier, when London had been awarded the 2012 Olympic Games.

For the rest of this day, however, the news was dominated by the tragedy of the London bombings. More news emerged hour by hour of the devastation and chaos that had been caused by the explosions. My mind went back to the times when I had asked tutors and guest speakers the question of how did the journalists that covered tragic events cope with the stress. They all agreed that it was a tough question to answer, because everyone deals with the stress in different ways. All that we could do was to keep working to keep our bulletins up to date, it did not hit me completely what had happened until I had gone home that evening.

A couple of weeks later, most of the volunteers, at WCR went out for a meal; Lee Banister had looked after the news team all week. Lee is a brilliant tutor, and he said he had been really pleased by the way the news team had improved over the week of the RSL. And although July the seventh had been a difficult day, we had all pulled together as a team, and we had got through it. I have made some very good friends at WCR, and I think that it augmented my Foundation Degree.