Community Media Network to lose premises in July

Tuesday July 01, 2003 04:11

by pro-DCTV

help them out

Community Media Network to lose premises in July - Urgent Appeal for Support!!

Community Media Network finds it can no longer afford to maintain its premises in 34 North Frederick Street (Dublin) and will have to move by the end of July. This poses a dilemma as the premises houses a small but high quality media centre. While groups are still coming to CMN to use the facilities, our financial resources have shrunk and we cannot keep it open.

However CMN will be continuing with a small staff of three running our Social Economy project. We are therefore looking for premises on a free or peppercorn rent basis and putting out an appeal for help.

Ideally we would like to find a place where we could continue to provide our service and have our equipment available, but until we do find alternative suitable premises for the centre, we need:

a room that could house three people and a place for the edit suite.

Storage for our multi-media equipment, library, and records.

The CMN media centre has been built over the past six years, it holds six multi-media networked computers supporting work in Dreamweaver, Quark, PhotoShop; the resource room houses a digital Video production and edit facility, along with a portable radio broadcast unit, and a number of stills cameras.

There is also our community media library holding videotapes and print resources. There must be somewhere that can house this much needed and desirable resource, it is very sad to think it could be dispersed.

Very regrettably, our Community Employment Project closes on 11th July, ending nine years of CE participation in core activities such as the production of "Tracking" and "Bulletin" and the construction and management of a community media website.

The period of EU funded projects 1997-2000 brought together a mix of professional workers, community groups, and our CE participants which was a healthy cross of perspectives and interests. But as is the case with many voluntary organisations without core funding our CE has been subject to cutbacks and the closure was inevitable.

You or your group can help by:

Let us know if you hear of available space that would house the centre;

Let us know if your group has space to store some of our library/equipment for six to nine months.

If you have used CMN's resources, or been supported by CMN, you could send us a short testimonial - a few lines - that we could use in a document to send to potential funders;

AND, of course, - get involved in the community television group in your area!

Margaret Gillan, Co-ordinator
CMN, 34 north Frederick St.,Dublin 1.

Tel: 01 - 878 3344
Fax: 01 - 878 3206
mgillan@connect.ie
website: http://www.cmn.ie