 Hi, I just want to say I've been in Malmo now for a few days and I've had a fantastic time so far what an incredible city you have here Okay, so I've led quite an improbable and unpredictable life It's taken me to Sao Paulo in Brazil where I've lived with 60 other people in a house to learn about the revolutionary music Organization for a duet show it's taken me to the streets of Cairo to Tariah Square During the recent revolutionary protests where tear gas was deployed onto the crowds Next year it will take me to sub Antarctica where I'll live on a boat with a bunch of scientists and artists and Through these experiences I've been able to work with and witness some of the most incredible cultural activists across the world Often those working in the most difficult of contexts that of war revolution or communities at conflict Today I want to talk about the power of Collectives the incredible things that can happen when people work together and about how resources or lack of resources Don't necessarily matter when you have a passion in people to make things happen Everybody has skills skills can be shared and ideas can be mobilized Now easier than ever with the internet and the connectivity it offers Through my work, I've been able to develop an international perspective of what's possible when people work together And I believe and maybe quite controversially that it's not about the fight. It's about making your own alternative So today I'm going to tell you my story starting from when I was 10 years old Because I think this illustrates really well the idea of do it together And then I'm going to talk a little bit about a few people that I met along the way that I think are really inspirational Okay, so when I was 10 years old my life changed forever and This something happens that changed everything from there on in and that's the reason I'm speaking here today And that's the reason I've got to do lots of incredible things with my life My parents bought me an electric guitar And so from the age of 10 I started to learn to play the guitar and then I decided that I wanted to form a band so I asked my sister to learn drums and my best friend Lizzie to learn bass and As soon as I started to work with these two other people writing and recording music In more opportunities began to emerge and more incredible things began to happen So first of all we started playing gigs all around the country for the next 10 years and from the age of 12 years old We were playing in bars and venues and so on At this point where we're located in Manchester, Manchester is in the north of the UK and The music industry was located in the south in London So as a band we were forever having to go from Manchester to London to play gigs in front of rooms of Very skeptical very cool very drunk A&R people with looking at us and deciding whether or not we would get signed to their record labels And after a while of doing this after a good few years of doing this we kind of got really disillusioned with the music industry as it was and We decided that we wanted to kind of disrupt this. We wanted to make our own alternative But we weren't the only people who felt like this Along with a bunch of other bands from Manchester and the north of England We decided to create our own platform for music from the north We created a record label called fat northerner records and as soon as we started to work together As soon as we brought all of these bands together again incredible things started to happen So we were able to access public money from the Arts Council to release our music We were able to tour the bands around the world taking them to as far as Austin, Texas to play incredible showcases and We were able to release music from 60 bands and artists from the north of England So just in this act of working together. We were able to transform our own opportunities Now at this moment the music industry was going through a massive transformation as you all probably know Digital technology was impacting upon the way music was being produced consumed and would be sustained Every facet of the music industry was changing. There were new gatekeepers new ways to discover music There were new ways to share your music. No longer. Did you have to produce? thousands of physical products and there were new ways to connect with your audiences new ways to talk to your fans and for the first time as Musicians you owned that relationship Now at this moment the major recording industry was talking about how terrible this was for music They were saying this is the death of the music industry And of course we were running our small record label and we were feeling very differently about this as Were a collective of other record labels based in the north of England and we want it We're having very different conversations So what we decided to do is create a platform for discussion about the future of music as we were having We created the platform of unconvention and when I say a platform I mean we booked a church in a place called Salford and we invited a bunch of improbable people who were involved in the music Infrastructure, but people who'd probably never attended a music industry event before an unconvention was born The event was tremendously successful We set up a manifesto that explains what unconvention is and these are some of the things from it unconvention is not about the music industry unconvention is not about the business of music unconvention understands the most interesting stuff happens on the margins We don't mind the mainstream. We just don't find it relevant and unconvention by its nature is of course unconventional Essentially unconvention is about strengthening empowering and giving voice to the grassroots music infrastructure through education events and initiatives It's to help people understand the world that they're working in and make a sustainable living from music So we did this event in this church in Salford and a bunch of people came and a lot of people said It was the future of the music infrastructure, but then some incredible things happened So people started to get in touch with us who'd attended the event and they wanted to take it to their cities around the UK So we worked with people to take this idea this platform and this ethos to places like Brighton Belfast Swansea and so on very quickly. We delivered lots and lots of events around the UK But then something truly remarkable happened people started to get in touch with us from very far away places around the world They'd heard about this idea and way of thinking online and they wanted to work with us to take this idea to places like India Places like Brazil Argentina Nepal and so on So we started to work with more and more people to take this idea to many different places As we did this we realized that unconvention in Nepal couldn't talk about the same things that we talk about in the UK So the idea of unconvention began to evolve with the more people that we involved in the process Unconvention in India for example was about an explosion of metal rock and electronic music And it was about building an infrastructure to support that music in Columbia unconvention was about music as a tool for social change Looking at how hip-hop is used in the poorest communities to transform those communities Okay, so we've done 55 events now in 22 different countries in the past four years over five continents We've done unconvention in many different languages and in many different cultural contexts Often taking it to some of the most perceived dangerous parts of the world We've done all of this on Really next to no resources We've never had any core funding and that for me is testament to the people involved in unconvention and their passion and drive To transform opportunities for people at the grassroots So the latest development with unconvention is that we've joined forces with 30 other countries 30 other grassroots music networks around the world to form something called the global music network And the ambitions of the global music network are three. The first one is about the mobility of ideas I'm forever going around the world and seeing really incredible things We want to share those ideas with people that might not have the opportunities to travel The second ambition is around the mobility of artists taking artists from Nepal and have getting them to play in Brazil and so on and the third ambition is to Create and disseminate free digital tools that enable the first two things to be possible So I feel like I've gone from a girl in a bedroom struggling and trying to learn to play guitar To many many thousands of people around the world who are working together on pure passion to transform the opportunities at the grassroots I Want to talk about a few examples of things that I've kind of encountered along the way Examples of how different organizations people people in cities kind of can work together to transform their opportunities First of all, I want to talk about my favorite city in the world and the city of Medellin in Colombia Medellin is Colombia's second biggest city and has struggled in the past with situations of war and with massive drug cartels Medellin was home to the infamous drug cartel leader Pablo Escobar, which some of you may have heard of But this is a city that through a process of working together is transforming itself to a much better place What they've done is the city have gone in and spoken to the communities directly Asking them what they want to transform their city and the communities generally said connectivity. We need connectivity And the city responded in a really innovative way What they did is they installed the world's first public cable cars that connects the highest mountains with the city center They took the idea of an escalator as you'd find in a shopping center and installed it onto the streets to help people get Between their homes quicker They have free Wi-Fi across the whole of the city even on the highest mountains Every child in the city gets a free laptop and they have adverts on the TV That show you how to make a wireless booster out of a tin can and they deliver the most incredible Informal education through the most magnificent structures located in the poorest communities Every time I go back to Medellin. I see it transform more and more and become a more equal place So for me Medellin is a real real good example of an innovative city The next example is an organization very close to my heart I have their logo tattooed on my arm and this is tuna El Fuerte an organization based in an area called El Val in Venezuela in Caracas This is a bunch of young people who realize the power of Creativity in its ability to transform opportunities for the community They went to Chavez and they asked him for a plot of lands and told them about his that about him about their idea He gave them a disused car park in front of a military fort and what they did was really innovative They took 30 disused shipping containers and they converted them into different cultural spaces creative spaces Dance studios theater studios recording studios and so on Every single week this space is accessed by over 500 young people And it's an example of a community working together to transform itself through creativity and through creative opportunity The next example is Uganda Every year we deliver an event called doa doa in Uganda when we first arrived in Uganda We realized that the music infrastructure was really really underdeveloped and the other thing was that people tended to want to work on their own So we went in and we promoted the idea of do it together of people coming together for a collective benefit But we also introduced a cooperative model and we got people to sign up to this cooperative and This year when I went to Uganda I signed up for the cooperative which now means that people in Uganda can develop their own music infrastructure They can access finance. They can access equipment access resources in a way that would they would never have been able to if they were acting alone So again, this shows the tremendous power of do it together Okay, so the last thing that I'm going to talk about today is an organization called for a do a show Now if some of you seen the program then you'd know that Felipe Alton Felder Was supposed to be here today to talk to you about for a do a show, but he's not So I'm going to explain the reason that he's not here and then I'm going to do my best to explain the complex Alternative economic economic model that is for a do a show Okay, so along with organizing the whole of the independent music infrastructure across Brazil For a do a show have a very politicized kind of arm to what they do in the recent Revolutions that have been happening across Brazil for a do a show decided to set up an alternative media channel called media ninja This is citizen journalism and very much reporting around police brutality in the recent revolution Because they did this and because it was so tremendously successful The traditional media reacted and they formed a backlash against for a do a show They've literally waged war on this organization So every day this week for a do a show has been headline news across Brazil Felipe called me on Skype at like five in the morning Saying I can't come but I want you to tell everybody why and so Felipe is in Brazil at the moment Fighting this battle with the traditional media because they want to represent what's happening on the ground So, okay for a do a show this for me is the most impressive example of an organization of people working together in the whole of the world For a do a show started in about 2003 when a bunch of students were a bit dissatisfied with what was happening culturally across Brazil If you know the geography of Brazil, and it's a pretty big place If you're a band in about in the year 2000 2003 You would play in one of two places in Rio or Sao Paulo and they're both located if this is Brazil They're located on the bottom of Brazil So the rest of the bridge the rest of Brazil was left without any bands playing without much cultural activity These students were located in a place called Queer Bar, which is in the bottom of Brazil And they decided they wanted to make more cultural activity happen in their city So what they did is they started a recording studio and a rehearsal space in Queer Bar What they realized when they started this space is that musicians generally don't have enough money to pay the full price for Recording and so on So what they did was really interesting Rather than charging musicians the full price to use a recording studio say it was a hundred dollars They charge them a reduced rate But what they did was they wrote down the amount that the bands owed them So they kept a logbook So the bands would give them say twenty dollars, but they'd write down the 80 that was owed Eventually what they did is they had all of this money that was owed to them and they needed in some ways for it to be paid back So they asked the bands to do other things not to pay them in cash But to run a venue or to become a sound engineer or to use their skills to pay back and feed into the system This happened and this was really successful and really kickstarted the music infrastructure in Queer Bar Then they realized we actually need some actual money to come into this system We need to pay for electricity for lights for water and so on So then they started putting on gigs and festivals where public audiences would pay into the system to come and attend cultural events This was really successful and things really started to take off in this place But the next step and really interestingly was a restaurant wanted to get involved and sponsor all of these gigs that were happening And rather than for a duetio taking ten thousand pounds ten thousand dollars from the restaurant They took half of the amount, but they said all of our bands must eat at your restaurant for free And so they started to generate this alternative economic model and it Transformed into credit card system with currency on the cards So this economic model was really successful the music infrastructure was really really successful there as well And then what they did is they just got into cars and they drove to the next city to the next city to the next city and so on And they set up this infrastructure across Brazil Today for a duetio operates over two hundred cities in Brazil It's run out of casters out of houses where people live work eats together It's a very very unusual and alternative setup. There's two thousand people that work out of these two hundred houses For a duetio mobilized now 33,000 bands every year across Brazil across these two hundred cities across six thousand cultural events that they organize and Amazingly astoundingly maybe for a duetio generate 44 million dollars a year for the independent music infrastructure all done on an entirely autonomous economic model So for me for a duetio are incredible example of what can happen when young people come together Work together have a drive and a passion to set up something culturally Politically important in their country and they can do it on this grand scale that generates so much income for the grassroots and independent music infrastructure So I come to the end of my presentation I hope that I've explained to you how much the idea of do it together means to me If you don't believe me, I have it tattooed on my back in Spanish. So I will just finish by saying thank you very much Hagamos lojuntos. Thank you