 Well, welcome. This is a training about how to create an ecosystem restoration music festival. I have had experience of doing this on a scale of around 400 people at a festival in Spain called Regeneration Festival and a smaller gathering of around 80 people just for the day as a party in London, both reticheted eventsand there were a lotta fun ac then Misha's been working on two festivals. You want to go ahead and briefly? Sure, thank you. Hi everyone. So, I've been hosting two restauration festivals in particular, one is called the Reef Forest Fest, which happens in Africa's southernmost forest. It's a crown jewel in the biomes in this area. a ydy'r ddweud there that are over a thousand years old and there we've had over a thousand people. I think the most is we've had 1200 people and planted over 12,000 trees over one event period. So lots of energy, really exciting, fairly stressful and with teams of over 100 people too. And then we've done a slower and longer festival every year for since 2012 called the Festival of Action. a'r baeth yn iawn y prinsod y datblygu a polytarchiaid a f foods i gyda'r credu ffordd a ddech chi'n mynd i amser ac y bydd, a rhai allwch armaeddiol, a mae'n dweud y mynd i'n dweud yn y Darellau Brynyddi, ond yn fawr ychydig yw yma, yw'n siarad y tsdyn nhw, mae'n meddyliadau bod yn eu ffoc�produ ar yr ysbhyngau i cyd-f bientôt i ddechrau, ac yn yr hollwch ar ukwyd-ddechrau i dzawer hyn. That's the Rhefore's Feast and the Festival of Action. Shall I go straight into the Y, Ash? Please, dear. We have prepared a presentation that has facts and figures and snippets from all of the events that we have both organised. We are going to both lead on different slides and there will be a chance at the end for you to ask questions. If a question comes up during the presentation, Llywodraeth o'ch ddweud i'r rhwng yn y gweithiau, a rwy'n gweithio'n ddiwedd yn y tîm. Rydyn ni'n meddwl ei wneud hynny? Rydych chi'n meddwl ei wneud hyn? Mae'n meddwl i ddweud hynny. Mae'n meddwl i'r cynnwys. Rwy'n meddwl. Gweithio. Rydyn ni'n meddwl i'r cweithio'r cyffrifiadol yn y gwaith, bydd ymlaeth ymlaen i'r ymlaen i'r ymlaen i'r ymlaen i'r ffordd. I'm sorry, I've done something silly and pressed the wrong button, bear with me, press that one, right. Cool, are you all still there? Yes, give us a thumbs up. Great, maybe we can shake it off a little bit. And then another thing we like to do when we're starting the day is we put our hands in the air, we go, and then we breathe out like lines and line ices. Perfect, yogi, breath. Great. So one of the first things that we like to do when we're starting anything is ready just to understand. Music festival. There's someone speaking, can you please mute? Yeah, that's another. If you're not speaking, can you please mute for now? So one of the things that's obviously critical is that you understand why you're doing what you're doing. I mean, in our case, there were two interesting situations that were happening. One was we had this forest relic, it had been degraded over 200 years due to unsustainable agriculture. And there just wasn't enough impact of conservation work that was happening in the area. And the people that were essentially supporting the forest system through protecting it with fire bricks didn't have the funding to be able to bring a lot of energy into the space. The other festival that we've been hosting, there was a big fire that had gone through there, we had 80,000 hectares with the landscape that were burnt. And so it was easy to kind of hone down on like a principle, why would we be here. The why allows for us to start a concept note. It allows for us to land with sponsors and volunteers and local municipalities to get them on board and to make them believe in the vision that you believe in. Obviously looking at where you want to do the event. I think there's a lot of trade-offs here, but the thing that we've found is that, you know, all over the world, there are magical places. And somehow you need to work out how do you wrap your space so that it is seemingly magical. And from our perspective, for instance, the first project I mentioned, the Plopbos Forest, it's Africa's southernmost forest. And, you know, so that you have this element of magic that when you're putting it out into the world, you can capture that imagination. And that, I suppose, brings people along for the journey and makes them feel inspired. Knowing what you want to achieve by doing the work that you're doing. For us, you know, you can bed that in developing a concept note, looking at the impact side of things, doing an ecological survey. But I think there's also some fluffy things that are important to be able to lock in on. You know, from the perspective of, we want to inspire people to reconnect with nature. And that's deciding that that's one of the things that you want to do. We'll also then give you some direction of how are we going to design the program. How are we going to allow for people to spend time in nature and not just do the restoration work that they're going to be doing. So trying to understand what is the vision, what is it that you're trying to achieve in order to get to a place of, yeah, I suppose having a succinct vision to drive this whole thing forward. Because from my perspective, I'm often the one that is on the telephone having to call partners, having to call local municipalities to essentially get the buy-in. And when I've got a, when I'm armed with the right commission where I feel confident when I'm trying to get across, it really does help that process. And then these elements will essentially allow for you to get to a place of deciding who is it that's your audience. And that audience may be very varied. It's important for you to kind of cast your mind back and see who's visited your space before, who's worked with your organisation before, and start to build these profiles. We generally have a profile like this in our communication strategy. And what we will do is we'll pin maybe eight or 10 individuals, which would be like university student, she's 22 years old, she loves the environment, she's studying a science of sorts, then recently retired, big into gardening, loves knowing the names of trees and plants. And so slowly but surely you can build an interesting profile of all the people that you are essentially going to be presenting this event for so that when you get to the point of being able to present the event through your communications, you know what kind of language, you know what kind of imagery, you know what the essence of your events presentation is going to look like. Yeah, thank you. Should we move on to the next slide? The next point is about setting the parameters. So how many people do you want to invite is one of the first questions. Once you've worked out what your essence is, what your vision is, why, why are you doing this event? Because you want to bring loads and loads of people to the sites that you're working on so that you can get loads of restoration work done. Or is it that you want to bring people together so that they can network and interact with one another to build more of a movement around what you're doing? What you want to your event to achieve will influence the number of people that you want to come. Thinking about how much your event is going to cost. If you want to have a smaller event that's a bit more high end, you could welcome fewer people and make the tickets a bit more expensive. And again, that depends on these character profiles that Misha was just talking about. Who is your event for? Who do you want to attract? That will then help you work out how many people you want to invite and how much your event is going to cost because it needs to be in a price range that will fit with the disposable income of the people that you're looking to attract to buy tickets. And how many tickets do you need to sell? So you need to think about a lot of stuff that's going to come later in the presentation around what your program is going to be, what sort of activities you want to do, who you want to invite to be speakers and bands, because that will impact the size of your budget. So you need to work out your budget and then you can work out what the carrying capacity is of the land as well because there are some ecosystems that are very fragile and bringing thousands of people there is going to be problematic. If there are very rare species that are going to be scared off by bright lights and loud music, you need to work out how many people your land could comfortably hold and that will be to do with how fragile it is. So these are all things that you need to start thinking about when you're planning your event and the answers to them will become clearer as we go through the other steps around budget permissions, that sort of thing. Well, thank you Ashley. When we did our first restoration festival sorts, we didn't have any brand identity at all. I worked together a poster next to No Time and we just put it out to the world and it to be fair looked more like a corporate conference, then something that was fun and engaging and was going to try and capture the essence of something that was a festival. And after we did it for the first time and honestly we've gone from this journey of 85 at our first event, over 1200 people. There's been these iterations of learning as an understanding and trying to work out like how do we get to a place of positioning it so that when someone who's external to Green Pop sees it, they realize, hey, this is a festival. They're automatic visuals telling that story. So, I mean you can find this online quite easily but really it's important to to first of all hone in on what is the essence of what you're trying to create, you know. If I think about Green Pop, our essence as an organization is called fun environmentalism. Our essence as an organization or if you know it, and then you try and apply that into, well, what is the brand look like of this festival that you're going to do. Once you've worked out what that is, you'll be able to start creating a guide, and that guide, it's pretty straightforward. You need to have the right kinds of coloring, the right kinds of typography, the right kinds of imagery. The benefit of having a guide like this ultimately allows for you to provide it to photographers, to videographers, to graphic designers, to social media managers, to anyone that's helping you build the festival. The challenge is if you don't have a strong starting point, and that starting point can be as simple as three pages. This is the logo, this is how the logo is used, these are the colors we're happy to use. This is the type of typography that we're using, and then potentially also speaking a little bit to the type of language that we use. For instance, green pop, we like to use non extinction language. So we want to talk about the big scary facts of what's happening in the world, climate change, doom and gloom, we very much focus on the positive language. And so if you go through that process, you're going to set yourself up a lot quicker for success in order to make it happen. I highly recommend that you look at some free platforms like Canva. They are really good at kind of giving you the nuts and bolts, the starting place of creating a brand guide, and knowing what colors and what texts can work together by looking at a lot of the templates that are out there. As a starting point, what I would do is actually go out there, create a mood board, find the things that inspire you, that you love, put that on to a presentation, speak it through with your team, and then try and find a comparable in Canva, or get a professional graphic designer to pull that together. Yeah, thank you. Yeah, we did the same thing when we were creating our brand, we had a small budget of I think 200 euros, and we decided to find a graphic designer who was as local as possible to the area so that our festival was creating job opportunities for people in the area. And he asked us a load of questions about the sort of associations that we would make with our idea. So we wanted it to be vibrant, we wanted it to be really fun and energetic, the same as what Mita said, and we spoke about the sorts of people we wanted to come. We told him about the place, we described it, and then he came up with various options that he felt encapsulated those feelings, and then we picked the one that we like. And often when you're working with a graphic designer you can choose when you're writing the contract the number of iterations that you want those graphic designers to go through. So you could say we want three iterations for x amount of money meaning we want the graphic designer to go to go back to the drawing board three times before a final design is made. Yeah, and maybe just to end off with that. I found in my process that the easiest thing to do was to actually go out there and find festival posters that I really loved as a starting place. I just go find them I say like this speaks to me it's got some really lovely nature options. It's got really nice color palette. I love the font. Here's three or four posters that I really love, and then being able to provide that to a graphic designer to say something in this like I like these graphics I like these funds. I like this format or this layout, and often as a cost saving exercise can be a designer to just design those up and then give you the elements. And once you have those elements, you're able to then push them into Canva. That's Canva with a C. And then you can pretty much design anything that you would like. And I can put the link for Canva into to the chat once we're done. And one thing we're going to move on next, which is a lot less exciting than the design process, but very much necessary and definitely you'd get a sense of achievement by completing it. The tragic accidents that happened in South Africa, not at our projects two years ago and our permitting and kind of governance things went from a simple 20 page document to short of 100 pages. And so I really cut my teeth on the process of trying to get my head around all the different elements that are necessary. The first sport of call is get hold of the local municipality and find out what their requirements are. Generally what you'll find is that they've got requirements depending on thresholds. So if you want 50 people, you don't need a permit. If you want 100 people, you've got a baseline permit. If you want 500 people, what you need is a lot. 10,000 people, they're going to ask for something that looks closer to a Bible. So first of all, ascertain what you need to do. I think there's some basic things that are always important. You need to have someone who's got basic medical training as a level one medic. Just so if something happens, if someone cuts themselves, someone has a cardiac, whatever it is, if there's a snake bite depending on where you are, we know how to act and you've got a process to be able to act accordingly. I highly recommend that you get yourself fire hydrants. You never know what's going to happen in a kitchen. At the end of the evening, people are sitting around, they're enjoying a fire together, and maybe someone's had too many drinks, maybe a gust of wind blows up. And so it's important that you not just have fire hydrants, but you also have a procedure and that there's always someone that has taken responsibility for being sober so that you're ensuring that the baton of responsibility is held. Because as part of this permitting process and governance is you need to have liability insurance and your liability insurance is going to come for nothing if everyone's even had a couple of beers. You know, you could be at the end of the day like, oh, we're all celebrating here. It's been so fun and so wonderful. Let's have a beer. And then something happens, and actually it all was very innocent, but because there was no sober responsible person, that lands up being problematic. We often have neighbours in the work that we're doing, and often the neighbours are very supportive, but being a festival, it's possible that the sound can be loud and maybe quite invasive. So it's important to first of all understand where your neighbours are at, invite them to come and participate. But what may happen is, depending on the size and the type of amplification that you're going to be doing, you might need a sound strategy and a sound permit. In South Africa, because legal system and the process is a little bit hazy, I was able to do that myself. I got online, I worked it out. You know, the mathematics behind it was relatively simple, but essentially it's working out. If I'm putting out x amount of decibels, and I know that the distance from where our front of our stage is to the next homestead is this far, the maximum amount of decibels I can put out is x. And so in order for us to get a permit, I need to be able to present that to local municipalities and ensure that they feel that we've done our due diligence on ensuring that we're not upsetting not just all the neighbours, but also there may be a local nature reserve. And you know, if you've got loud strumming into the night, those biodiversity hotspots aren't necessarily wanting all the human noises coming their way. I think it's also important to try and understand the importance of having ECO officers, ushers, emergency procedure people. What we generally do is from the time the first team member arrives, so the last person leaves, there are people that are on site that are essentially not top management. So I'm not the person responsible and my production team are not responsible. It's essentially, if something goes wrong, they will know that this is the way we need to guide people as an emergency meeting point. They will know that you're not supposed to park your car there because there are sensitive species over there, or you're not supposed to slight independent fires because we might start a much bigger fire. So what you'd need to do is create a strategy of the basics that everyone who's on site has agreed to, and you can put that forward in your pre-departure emails. You can mention that on arrival, but to have those people that really become kind of the good cop, bad cop, which takes away a little bit of responsibility for you, but also allows for you to have much more eyes and kind of a collective knowledge around the things that are important to capture while you're on the ground. This is quite a broad subject and I've got a fair amount of writing about this. I think it's largely going to be location specific, but if anyone is interested, I'm happy to share an open document which has got quite a long, robust conversation starter to get you through the full throes of this. But it's a tricky one and it's important that you really bite down into it. Ashley, I'm going to hand it over to you for infrastructure needs and capacity. Okay, so you need to start thinking about what sort of infrastructure you're going to need. Hopefully you'll have some idea now of what sort of event you want to host, who you want to invite, what you want the event to do for the world, and how many people you're thinking of inviting. So then you need to think about, okay, so what infrastructure do we need to serve these people in the way that we dream of? For the regeneration festival, we used these stretch tents, which not only work very well, but they also look very aesthetically beautiful and natural. And they're quite quick and easy to put up as well. We found a local Spanish company again, as much as possible, local businesses. We were lucky that we had some funding up front from someone who was involved in the team. And so obviously this is ideal scenario, but if you need to find other ways that are cheaper, that's totally understandable as well. So this was the kitchen area. We found a woman here, a local lady who ran a catering business, and she focuses on slow food. So all of the food that she gave out in her kitchen was from the region and all grown organically or regeneratively. So that's what I mean here by fine companies that align with your vision and ethics as much as possible. For the music, we had another one of these stretch tents and a stage and all of the music equipment. And again, we found a local sound engineering company that does events and told them what we wanted. And they told us what we needed, which was really helpful because we weren't quite sure what we said. We want this many people to come. These are the sorts of bands that we're thinking of inviting. These are their instruments, et cetera. And they were like, OK, you're going to need this lighting. You're going to need this sound equipment, et cetera. This is the cost. Lighting is important to think about. You can see here that we had some. We've got some. What are these lights called again? A student lighting. Yeah. They're quite popular at festivals because they look really nice. They're easy to put up. We didn't really think about the lighting properly until until a couple, maybe a week before the event when we were walking around. Things were already in place and we were like, hang on a minute. It's really dark in the areas where there aren't any tents. You need lighting to lead people from the main kind of eating, hanging out music workshop areas to where people are camping, for instance. Because it can get, well, you're just setting yourself up for people to fall over and get lost and whatnot. Otherwise, that's something that we hadn't thought about until the last minute. And hopefully, luckily, we found a festoon company pretty quickly. Your workshop space. How big do you want it to be? You need to think about tables and chairs, you know, how many people are going to be eating? Will they want to sit down, stand up? You kind of have to just project your mind forward into what you think the event will look like. Run through the event in your head and then think, OK, we're going to need XYZ. Make a list, find companies that you can source it from, create a budget. Toilets and showers. Obviously, a lot of the places where restoration festivals happen are off grid. So compost toilets are an obvious one. Then you have to think about what you're going to do with them after the festival. You could build your own or you could work with a company that will bring them in and take them away again. It depends on what the land is used for for the rest of the year. Do you own it? Would it be useful to have those toilets at another time? You have to think about what you're going to do with the human euro as well. Are you just going to dig deep holes and let it go into the ground and compost on its own? Are you going to move it? That, again, will all depend on your specific context. For showers, we just use those shower bags that you can buy that are solar charged. Maybe you want to say how you did your showers? Cool, yeah, thank you. I mean, we've had various iterations of building showers and making different types of setups work. We found that the donkey boiler can work really well, so that's getting like an oil drum, putting a fire under the oil drum, sending the water through that, and essentially the heat of the oil drum pushes it back into a pipe. A lot of the places that we're doing tree planting have got a tremendous amount of non-indigenous vegetation. So we've got all the surplus biomass, and that's quite an efficient way. But I know of people that are making compost showers even by having a circular kind of grid of copper piping inside a compost heap, and you can get some retained heat for a long period of time. We've also built long drop toilets, composting toilets, kind of grand thrown toilets that look over the wilderness. And I have to say that composting toilets can be very efficient. The ones that we've been building are the ones that kind of come with these wheelie bins, which are maybe a 400 litre bin. And so they last a long time, especially if you have a separator attached to them, they take forever to fill up. And then we just strap the tops and push them to the back of the nursery, and a year later we actually use that to pot out baby trees. And we find that it's actually such a fantastic use of resources bringing it back into the system. And then maybe just on the tents, just to lean into what you were talking about. So I personally set up a lot of the tents that we build, and stretch tents are a fantastic win for weather, for protecting against sun wind protection. They can be quite expensive though. And what I found works really well is seeing if there's a way that you can lean into businesses or other festivals that own their own infrastructure, that are not hosting events at the same time as you year, as you would be hosting an event. And I'll give an example, we work with Africa Burn here in South Africa, and every year they give me a host of tents, and I've just got to pay for the insurance on those tents. And essentially pay for setting them up myself. And so I've worked out how to set them up. It took me a couple of times, but I know how to set them up without them coming crashing down. You do however, in normal circumstances, need an engineer to sign off on it. Because the pressure on, you can see the centre pole there, the pressure on that centre pole is pretty intense, and if there's a wind that picks up and the whole tent starts blowing, you can cause a lot of damage, and you can hurt people quite badly. So it's important that whoever's setting it up really knows what they're doing. So if I could give you one piece of advice, or a group of people that like setting up stretch tents, and it is quite an addictive process, you can almost build a village by virtue of setting these up. It feels quite exciting starting with a zero infrastructure landscape coming in, putting up the tent, putting up flags and bunting and lighting, and tada, it's all there. And just seeing if there's some sort of exchange that you can do if you don't have budgets. If you can pay for it, then definitely get someone to do it for you. Yeah. Yeah, there certainly are lots of people out there who love going from festival to festival and helping be the build crew. And in return, you feed them and house them whilst they're doing the build process. There were some people that came to the regeneration festival who loved doing that sort of thing, and that's a lot of what they do. But we'll get to that when we talk about the build later. Utilities, yeah. So what I was saying about lighting, this is pretty much all a repeat, actually, of what I just said. In terms of water, we ordered large water tanks and filled them up and then put them around the site so that there was drinking water available. That was our off-grid solution. Do you have another method that you used, Misha, for getting drinking water to people? I mean, we've literally had every kind of solution under the sun from bringing big bowser's in and having massive water tanks, big plastic kind of giri can water tanks. We generally dot 25 litre tanks both in the field where we're planting and in the campsites. And sometimes we've had situations where we've been quite remote where we've had to kind of depend on river water, which has been downstream of villages and a little bit iffy in terms of a coli, and then having to boil it and put chlorine in. So I think it's important to really consider your location when you're thinking about this kind of thing because a supply of water and having water security is really a make or break in terms of making sure that you have a successful event. We had one instance where we had water run out halfway through an event. The only water that we had available was water from a municipal, but we had to drive it in with a water tank every second day. And the water that was coming out of the taps was from a local dam and there was worms in the water and all sorts. So it landed up being a real challenge and trying to save a project event when you have a water issue can be incredibly problematic. Yeah. There is also the option of, I know I've worked at another festival, not one that I set up, but one that I've worked at, where they collect rainwater in these huge rainwater catchment tanks throughout the year because they have quite high rainfall where they're based and then they got the water tested before the event to make sure that it was clean enough and then they used, they just used that. That's another option. So yeah, Misha's now going to talk about the difference between pre-programming your event or doing it collaboratively. Perfect. We've got a fairly big social media following between our different platforms to probably have about 75,000 people. And so when we put out word, we generally get a lot of feedback, which is fantastic. I don't know if everyone's got that resource, but one thing that's great about things like Facebook is that you can pay for advertising. And in paying for advertising, what it allows you to do is create crafts and advert that says we're hosting a tree planting festival or restoration festival. We'd like to sign up bands. And then being open and honest from the beginning, this is very much a participatory event. We are looking to co-create this space. If you come, we will feed you, we will house you, and we will give you a travel stipend. And that may be the way you want to do it. Another way that you can do it, which you could add to this or do it separately, is come up with an idea of the budget that you have. And then looking at your audience profile, try and work out how do you leverage the right kinds of bands that are nearby or internationally that are coming through that area and get them on board. I think what we found is that it's quite effective to spend a lot of money on one or two bands that are real draw factors, and then spend a little bit of money on just incentivising grassroots bands, bands that are just starting off, or mom and shop kind of garage bands that are more of a weekend thing, and that can bring a bit of fun. And then a DJO2 also helps, because ultimately with a DJ you can kind of set a tone, but it doesn't have to be a banging house music. You can have melodic music. You can have journey music. You can have all sorts of really gentle kinds of music, but the infrastructure doesn't cost that much. The challenge with bands is that the more you pay the band, the more expensive it gets from a production point of view. And you think, okay, I'm going to be spending $1,000 or $2,000 on a band, but you're going to spend double that on the production. And so when you're building a budget, it's important that you're understanding that these amounts can expand quite dramatically. One of the ways that we've managed to work that out is by partnering up with audio colleges. So schools that essentially teach young people how to be in charge of musical events, and they love the hands-on experience, and they often have their own equipment. And then there's obviously the burn style, which is like hyper-participatory. And there's various ways you can do that. You can put it out to the people who are buying tickets and say, what is your magic power? If you are a superhero, what is the gift that you would bring? Is it a talk? Is it a workshop? Is it something that's musical? Is it daily dancing? Or, and then you can filter that into a program that you structure. I do recommend that you ask for some sort of reference or a link or some sort of something that you can see the calibre of the individual because we have had situations where people have put themselves forward to something and then they haven't quite been that, or they've just been really novice. And we put them at kind of like almost starved the show and built themselves up a lot. And then everyone's expecting something really mind-blowing and it wasn't that. So, I think everyone can be invited, but it's your responsibility to curate that journey to see how are we going to manage this energy. We've all had a hard day's work. We all wanted to rest, or maybe we all did a hard day's work yesterday and now we're having a day full of workshops and talks and things that are entertaining. Who's going to get centre stage and who's going to maybe have these micro breakaway type experiences. And then the last way you could do it is really just throw it to the wind. You set up a couple of spaces which allows for anyone to step into those spaces and you have a board and on that board you can say it's the green stage and the blue stage and the walking stage and the meditation stage and there's all the times that are available and there's just cue cards and people can write their name on the cue card and they can write what they're wanting to achieve and they can put their name in that slot and then that slot is taken and it's up to them to advertise it and they can honk their horn and walk around and tell people I'm going to be doing a talk. It's about X, Y and Z. I encourage you to come along. And all of these things can work and some of them can work together. And you can even like we have quite a few different scenarios where we try and make a participatory. So we have an open mic experience for kids. Kids love to show their talent and it's a nice way to make it come alive and so you could have an hour where the kids all know that they can prep a song and bring it and showcase their song and it's just so heartwarming to see something like it or you can pose a question to your audience before the event and there could be an interesting question like the meaning of happiness. We've had sessions where we call it cat Stevens and conspiracy theories and we say like let's talk about vaccines, let's talk about COVID-19, let's talk about all the stuff where people have differing opinions about and we can throw it into a melting pot and have a really good facilitator allowing for everyone to have a voice and really help creating a sense of community and it's not just the spectator and server type relationship which can happen with a festival. Thanks Ashley, you're welcome to go on to the next slide. Okay, so I spoke a little bit earlier about food and catering and what is really beautiful about an event like this is and what we really wanted to do, this goes back to the first slide about the why. With the regeneration festival what we really wanted to do was showcase the products that were grown in that region and instill a lot of local pride in the people that live there because it's an area that's very, not only ecologically degraded but socially degraded as well obviously the two are linked and so a lot of the people that live in this region are some of the only ones left a lot of young people have left and so we wanted to reinstill this sense of pride in still remaining and living in this place and it's a really big agricultural zone for Europe it produces a lot of Europe's fruit and veg so that was one of the things that we really wanted to highlight and because there were so many people coming from across Europe and even from across the world to this event it was a chance for them to the people that live there to show off what they grow and also to instill pride in regenerative agriculture as well we wanted the event to be an encouragement for farmers to farm regeneratively by showing that there are people that are really into that as an idea so yeah like I said when Karnaw with her local slow food catering company she did all of the food you have to make sure that they have a health and safety certificate but if they're a professional company then they will and she did a lot of local dishes to show off the cuisine of the area as well again fitting in with that sense of pride you could also do the food yourself if you want to if you have people in your team or you want to work with volunteers to do the cooking that could be a way of making it a bit cheaper but instead we went for the easier option of bringing a company in so that they could make an income from the festival we charged them a pitch fee which basically means they paid us an amount of money to be there and then any money that they made they kept you could do that or you could just ask for a cut of their profit instead or you could ask for both it's up to you as to what you think would work best for your situation there is a chance that it could go wrong though it kind of went a little bit wrong for us and it's good to also talk about the things that didn't go right we found this company I can't remember what it was called now but they make meals from food waste we were like oh great they were local and we were like yes this is a really sustainable company let's bring them in we didn't taste their food before the event which we should have done because it just wasn't very nice unfortunately and so a lot of people were like what is this and it was a bit too late for us to do anything about it so that's something that I recommend you do try and taste the food of the companies that you're bringing in to feed people it goes without saying as well that you need to think about the sort of packaging that they give their food in try and get them to buy degradable packaging I've worked at festivals before where in order to ensure that that definitely does happen and that the food company doesn't cut corners you buy the biodegradable cups, bowls, plates etc spoons and you give them to the company so that it's guaranteed that they're not going to come with throw away plastic stuff and then obviously because all of that's compostable if you're making compost on site you can just add all of that stuff in as carbon material which is putting the resource back into the system and in terms of times we had like a set breakfast time a set lunchtime and a set dinner time in the schedule so that people could eat together which was really nice actually because it meant that rather than people just going and getting food whenever they wanted because we were a smaller event it encouraged you to get to know the other people in the festival because you sat next to them at dinner Misha, did you want to add anything else? Yeah, I mean we tried various iterations to this we brought in caterers, we bought all the food fed everyone ourselves out of one kitchen which we kind of kitted and managed in the whole shebang what I have found works quite well is we get a caterer which we essentially arm with a kitchen a mobile kitchen and we arm them with local produce and large bags of legumes and grains and all the things that you're going to be cooking up and that is specifically for your team so you can keep it cost effective there's always a lot of food available and essentially you know for the team to be eating the food of the vendor it then becomes quite time inefficient for the vendor because they're having to make team food and it can become quite costly for you so to kind of separate our team from participant or event goer and then for the vendors what we'd recommend is we got a vendor for every 100 people that came on and an alternative vendor too so you could have someone who's doing like fluffles and hummus and la la la and then also like someone who's got a snack bar or a juice bar or something that's like quite nicely complementary but it isn't another food stuff and they're not starting to what's the word, cannibalise each other the way that we got around packaging is we actually make it a zero packaging festival so everyone's asked to bring a knife, a plate, a fork, a spoon etc and we've set up wash stations which are cleaned every hour and then there is essentially a stand where people can rent a knife for a plate spoon for the same amount that it costs us to buy it and they get the money back if they bring us the goodies back so by the end of it we have zero packaging from that side of the food things obviously some food stuffs you know the bulk bags or grains or whatever those will come in packaging but really great to be able to serve something to someone on a plate and have them hold the responsibility of their own meal all the way to the end and we found it works we've done it with a thousand people before there is always a few outliers there's a couple of people that maybe leave their plates and someone has to wash it and it's important that we have staff that are able to manage that side of things Thank you Shall we move on to the next one? Yeah Great So accommodation this is the kind of thing that can really make or break your events you know we've had situations where we've set up beautiful glamping really lovely lighting personalised name tags on tents and then we've had situations where we just weren't going for the same market but the rain pulled in and the tents weren't as waterproof and it landed up being quite challenging so it's important first to kind of understand what are you trying to achieve through the accommodation and how are you going to do this and what we found works really well is trying to position your tickets in a few different tiers one is allowing for people to bring their own tent they can set it up, they fend for themselves and that way they can come in at a less expensive ticket then setting up tents for people where they just bring their own bedding so you have a tent and a mattress and there is a string of lights that run through this tented area and you can even put a stretch tent over it so you've created this nice little micro environment so if weather does come through you know that everyone's protected under there and no one's going to come to you, you're halfway through the festival and the rain chucks down and says hey you rented us a tent, it's full of rain and you've got bigger things to think about than someone with a tent and another way to bring value to the local community is looking at homestays and we've done this many times we've said to be advertising the tickets then underneath the tickets there's accommodation it'll be like here are the various types of other accommodation available in the valley and kind of based on least expensive to most expensive because some people do want to splash out some people will be happy to drive in every morning the five minutes from the local accommodation down and what that does is it makes the festival experience more inclusive because now what you're doing is you're bringing in the local community so allow for them to get some of the value out of the festival the other thing is it actually reduces the pressure on your services you know if you have 20% or 30% of your festival goes all staying off site what it allows for is less pressure on toilets less pressure on the water consumption that needs to be done and I think it just kind of spreads out the resources a little bit better I recommend looking at the various different iterations that you can work out in order to give people a mixed opportunity of the types of accommodation available I agree we also had the option we linked people to hotels in the area for those who wanted to stay inside we had an issue with the bell tents that we hired because we hired them from Valencia which is an area nearer to the coast where it's a lot warmer where the festival was is a thousand metres elevated so it's quite a lot colder especially at night and so we told the clamping company this is how cold it's going to get the actual festival ended up being way colder at night than we expected it to be the bedding that was provided by this clamping company who were used to doing events on the beach where it's a lot warmer all they really had was thin blankets so people had paid a top dollar for glamping and they were freezing cold that was obviously a big lesson we had to rush to a shop and buy way more blankets after the first night so that they wouldn't be too cold that's something to think about where you're getting the glamping tents from make sure that they really really know what the temperature is at night so they bring the right bedding for your guests this is an interesting conversation essentially it's around how do you ensure you get people to the events and there's various types of draw cards outside of ensuring that you get the language rights and the whole visual appeal is you've nailed and one of the things that I found works quite well outside of the headline bands and speakers which is listed here is looking at organisations that have the pool of groups in the area so for instance you may be able to look at local universities that have a conservation society or a birding society or a green society in my example I would give we have an organisation that deals with women empowerment and they essentially take women from low income communities and they give them an opportunity to do things that are different because they're all stuck in this very isolated space township in South Africa and they don't really get to go into other interesting places another one is called Activate Leadership and they are a social entrepreneurship incubator organisation and they like to marry the principles of environmentalism with social entrepreneurship but a lot of the people that are in this incubation period don't quite understand the full grasp of what environmentalism looks like and so having the opportunity to come to a restoration camp or restoration festival gives them this deeply immersive experience around what restoration looks like and what environmentalism looks like and it's not just this poster green piece that's what environmentalists do it's not just the types of groups and they can be quite broad there could be businesses that are there could be a local TEDx group that are similarly minded education schools so what we've done in the past is we would get an intern or someone that's happy to take through a lot of contacts and make different spreadsheets and those spreadsheets would then allow us to find an email and essentially direct that email so if there's 20 yoga studios in a 50 kilometre radius or 50 mile radius let's speak to the yoga studios and get them to activate their yogi people to come and join and speak their language we're hosting a restoration festival I can't remember what the term is but there's a term for it this is a fantastic way for your yogis to reconnect with nature would you be open to sharing this with your community we have someone who's a speaker and would be happy to come around and speak to one of your classes we have a poster, you're welcome to put it up at the class and we find it works really well because if you make sure that you link the dots so it's obviously not the local firing range or the local supermarket it's the types of people that would be interested in restoration as a concept and finding ways that you can link the dots link the musical dots, link the wellness dots link the environmental dots and get them to be inspired to take a risk and come and check it out if five of your people book will give you a free ticket and that might incentivise them to want to be part of gaining that momentum and getting people enthused about being part of your mission would you like to add to that Ash? No I think you covered it, what I wanted to say is already written here in the text about think headline bands or speakers that are well known that helps to bring people in who would want to come to the festival just to see their favourite band so then we get to the point where we can start thinking about putting a schedule together we had three main days during our event Friday, Saturday and Sunday people arrived on Thursday from I think it was 4pm and they left on Monday morning there were still a few people left on Monday afternoon but that's quite a common way of doing festivals and it works well so you'll see across the top in green we have 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 areas these were the workshop spaces or the different parts of the festival site that had quite clear identities we had quite a lot of fun inventing the names and essences of these different places so there's a place called Labotica which we turned into a big botanarium green house sort of vibe a lot of the stuff around growing and planting and seeds and food and that sort of thing was in there there was a place called Alchimia where a lot of stuff around transformation was being discussed both social transformation, composting things that turn one thing into another thing so we had fun with creating those and then we decorated them in a way that made sense for those ideas and then down the side we had different time slots when different things were happening every morning there was a yoga session that happened in this really beautiful area of trees by a lake that people could drop into all of the workshops that we organised workshops and music and stuff was all included in the ticket whereas some other festivals put on extra things that are not included in the ticket price so it's going to be an extra amount for it's up to you if you want to do that or not if they're really special things that are quite expensive you could there's a festival in the UK that does that where they put on feasts with professional chefs and they're an extra cost but again it depends on who you're attracting and whether or not they'd be interested in that we didn't have too many things happening at the same time that were too similar and we made sure that there was a set amount of time for lunch, dinner and breakfast that I mentioned earlier and a set time where the bands were on a set time when the DJs were on you can see there are band names in different times as well you can start off with a schedule that's a little bit more vague and then as the event comes closer when you filled in all of the gaps the people that have bought tickets you can send the finalised schedule to near the time so that they get more excited as it comes along Did you want to mention anything else about scheduling? Every morning was the restoration slot so you see here this line I don't know if you can see in my mouth or not where it says 10 o'clock in the morning we had a two and a half hour restoration slot which obviously it's a restoration festival we didn't want it to be too early in the morning so that people were still hungover and asleep but we also didn't want it to be too late in the afternoon when it got really hot so we chose keeping it at the same time every day meant that people weren't scratching their heads and asking around as to what time it was we also gave a printed handout of the schedule to every person when they came in when they registered to arrive at the festival and we had printed out large card versions of them in set places so that people could just go and have a look at what was happening at specific times Anything to add? I suppose the thing with the scheduling we found is that it's going to be very site-specific and much like you mentioned it can get quite hot I'm a little bit more of a hard work driver which has kind of backlashed a few times so we try and get going around 8 in the morning we plant until lunch, have a brief lunch and then get everyone up and dancing again and enthused and then go back until almost sunset we find that it's possible to plant in the region of 10 trees per person so if there's 100 people you can plant 1000 trees but that includes the people who are passing the trees and the people that are putting on the sun block and the people that are drumming the drums so some people are planting 20 trees and some people are pushing a wheelbarrow full of juice to keep people hydrated so trying to find the balance of your own schedule may take some time I've always found that it's a bit of a it's a moving target and it needs to consistently be adapted according to what opportunities come your way and the time of year that you're doing it when sunrise is, what type of weather is happening and not ever seeing the schedule as a stagnant thing it needs to be very much alive and then moving on to the work itself hey so the first thing that we do is we create a strategy of what restoration work needs to be done and there we'd work with one of my programme managers with whoever the site manager is and we create something that's a fairly robust plan and then we try and whittle it down to something that's very crystal clear and easy for a regular punter to understand because the belief is that you need everyone to feel like they're part of this process they understand a little bit of the science and they're not just kind of flinging plants into the ground and that you can siege to them leading into the events giving it to them in the pre-departure information some interesting reading that gives them some context and allows for them to feel enthusiastic about the quality side of things because what you don't want is to become this kind of restoration race where it's just about how fast we can get the plants into the ground or how fast we can dig the swale and then the swale is kind of like this stinky little thing and it doesn't really do anything so you really need to be emphasising the value of the work of comprehensive and then understanding what rules do you need and I've made this mistake a few times where we arrived on site and the tools weren't quite correct because I didn't understand the landscape properly and we host four or five restoration type events every year but the difference between here and ten kilometres down the road or one kilometre down the road can be an entirely different landscape and so understanding those landscapes are critical to understanding those tools and I'll give you an example in one year we managed to plant 9,000 trees about 700 people the following year we had the same amount of people and we planted maybe 2,500 trees less and that was because the entire site was completely overrun with grass and we had to hand pool and hoe grass out and we actually planted the plant species that we were wanting to put in and the issue was that we walked the site at a time that was at the back end of summer and so the grass hadn't established itself and we weren't fully aware of how the landscape was going to change between the months of doing the planting and not doing the planting and so it's important that you've got your eye on the ball if we need to, can we get a dig a loader in here or can we get a lawn mower at least to cut the bulk of the organic material down so just having a good understanding of that then the rest of the things there's some really great tools in South Africa that we use and I'm sure there's even more modern tools in Europe and the States but things that we've really enjoyed using are things like a mop or a sail and that's just a big square piece of fabric with handles on it and it allows for you to move around a huge amount of mulch at the same time you can have four people in each corner holding the top it can be two by two metres wide so a really big piece of fabric and you can move things across the landscape really efficiently a lot more efficiently than loading things into a wheelbarrow we encourage people to bring their own spade and label their own spades but what we generally do as well as we would have one spade for every three, four people and then a couple of other tools hose and picks and earth moving things and trials for youngsters or people that don't have as much energy and so by having an assortment of different types of tools people can then easily flow into the work that suits their fitness level suits their interest and allows for you to get the most of everyone that's on the landscape because what you don't want to do is just have shovels when it's not just a shovel kind of job your toolbox really needs to represent a spectrum of tools which will allow for you to do as much as possible on the landscape I clicked by accident and it moved the slide forward when you were talking about restoration stuff sorry I felt like such a noob when it comes to tech and stuff one simple click and it all goes wrong I'm thinking about some lessons restoration wise from our festivals we had music playing whilst the restoration was happening so that people were dancing and digging at the same time and that was one of the main things that we were really shouting about was the idea of this was a festival where you plant the beat and the music that we chose we welcomed in a band who had taken sound samples from the land and then they'd mixed the sound samples in to the tunes that they were playing so there were like sounds of the toads in the pond and the sounds of spades and you can get really creative with it which was really fun and everyone was so happy and excited and to see hundreds of people all planting aromatic native shrubs together whilst dancing we were like yes this is why we did this it was a really good feeling I'm aware of time so let's move on to staffing needs I think you were going to do this one Misha Was I, okay fantastic so yeah look I mean there's nothing more critical than having the right team I've had great teams and I've had average teams and it can really make or break yourself and the project and your or stress and so mapping out a good team and that team doesn't have to be made up only of paid people what we found works really well as we put out an advert that says we're looking for volunteer team and we're looking for paid team and these are the types of criteria we're looking to achieve through this team you know you need admin people you need people that understand managing people you need people that can manage stock you need people that understand working in landscapes our facilitation team in itself is probably about 25 people strong because each of the planting teams would be a planting leader a planting assistant a quality control manager, fund police manager and so that it isn't all on the shoulders of one person so understanding how do you set up your team and how do you ensure that there's a captain for each team and they'll be answerable what we do find is it's important to have key people in certain areas who are paid and they're paid well enough they're not if you don't have those people then what can happen or if you have those people and they're not paid then the sense can be well I'm not getting paid for this I'm not really open to having this level of responsibility so if you have a paid person an assistant underneath that person that's also paid and they have maybe two volunteers or 20 volunteers that are working under them regardless of what it is whether it's in the entertainment space or the food space or the build space or ticketing whatever it is but they know that they've got a line manager and they know they've got a strategy of what they're trying to achieve and then it's a journey for these folks that are coming and joining in and the whole idea with restoration and environmentalism is if it's not fun no one's going to want to come back so find ways to make people feel like they're part of something they need to feel that kind of togetherness and what we'd often do is we'd have a pre-meeting where we'd rally people up we'd send out some cool emails with fun widgets and whatnot we'd get people to the pre-meeting we'd have one of our team do something that's inspirational so that makes people feel like they're part of something that's a movement it's not just another event you'd speak through the plan for the weekend or for the week or the two weeks or whatever it is so people can visualise it so when they're on the ground they're not just hitting the ground running and they don't know what to expect and then when it comes to the event itself to try and manage the energy by having enough staff welfare we throw staff coffee at the end of the day everyone gets a beer to manage the timing shifts are incredibly important people can't work 16-hour shifts three days in a row because they're not going to like you at the end of it and so making sure that you're managing that energy and then we regularly have a team meeting and those we try and keep them fun and upbeat we sometimes say everyone bring a gift at one point to one of the meetings and I try and bring a gift to every meeting and that would be maybe I play one of my favourite dancey songs and I get everyone in the team dancing and cheering and kind of just getting into a place of like it's six in the morning everyone else is asleep we've got to get this baby going how are we going to do that and make sure that everyone feels engaged and stoked to start the day even though they're still sleeping their eye and they've only had five hours sleep and they're a little bit pissed off but they're here and they're committed and you lean into that and you dance to another one bites the dust by Freddie Mercury and by the end of it everyone's like pumped up and we can get into the meeting which really is more of an admin thing so before you get into the admin you inspire and you get people rallied around what you're trying to achieve yeah thank you Really great clip, Misha I love the idea of everyone bringing a gift because there's nothing like gifts to make people excited about knowing somewhere I love that idea In terms of funding the festival ideally you want to be able to fund it via ticket sales alone and that would be the easiest thing to do and if you need money up front to pay for things before the festival starts which you definitely will selling early bird tickets will mean that you have money up front early bird tickets being ones that people buy a year in advance and they're slightly cheaper however if there are other avenues that you have available to you for external funding then that works as well and then there's the idea of sponsorship too sponsored by companies we applied for a few grants to fund the added extra elements and we also had one of our founders as a benefactor which really helped but ideally you want to be able to sell the tickets to cover the costs Anything from your side on funding Misha Yeah look I think there's lots of ways that you can bring in funding merchandise you can get people to raise funds for the trees as a way to get tickets we run this thing called trees for fees if you raise ten trees for instance and a tree costs eight euros and if someone reaches their goal then they can get a ticket and you can kind of work out like well look if we get a thousand trees raised this way we know there's enough fat on that to pay for some of the ticket expenses and to pay for some of the treat-lancing expenses You already mentioned it but having vendors we generally have multiple vendors like five or six vendors so you can both save money through vendors by asking the vendors to contribute a certain amount of meals which could go to vans and speakers where you normally have to feed them and you can ask them to pay a fee for vending at your event merchandise is an option, it can be complicated and a lot of it gets ruined but for instance if you can get an outdoor company like a Patagonia to sponsor your team ticket or your team t-shirts what you could do is ask them to do an overrun 100 green t-shirts and ask them to do 100 of another colour and then participants could buy that other colour and that way you know they're already setting up their machines to print your regeneration festival logo on a t-shirt it's a nice way to kind of add a gift and that's something you can sell up front so you potentially don't even have to work out how many you want and kind of do guesswork when you sell the ticket you can sell the t-shirt at the same time by asking people if they want to add that to the bill yeah, nice idea Patagonia did do that for our event they gave us free t-shirts for our team so I should have asked them, I didn't know next time so yeah we're taking the topic of selling tickets now to something called Ticket Tailor which is an online ticket selling event there are different options and you can just add this as a sort of plugin into your website or you just direct people to a specific page on the ticket selling website where they buy tickets from there you need to consider whether you want to pay the VAT or whether you want to add the VAT onto the ticket price so that the ticket purchaser pays the VAT we had different tiers as well so we had low income, average income, high income for the high income we had I think it was called Festival Friend or something where they paid more and then that subsidised the cost of the cheaper tickets and then we also created a deadline for buying tickets and limited ticket numbers in each tier to stimulate interest and momentum and then the early bird ticket that I discussed with you earlier to get people to buy them early so you have income to begin with before the festival planning really begins I'm just going to go ahead and go to the next slide because I want there to be time for questions Misha? I think with marketing I almost hate the word marketing I think to create awareness to create momentum one of the you want to almost create that experience of when there's a sardin run and there's this energy that's on the ocean with all the fish moving and in order to do that you really need to try and get as many people as possible to start talking about your event and there's lots of ways that you can do that and some of the ways are effective and some of the ways are less effective what I've found works really well is getting the people in your community to create about it a lot you can use social media and you can use local media press you can make a video and put it on YouTube and share it around but really getting people to talk about your event and getting your close community to be your ambassadors I found works the best and working from where you're at at the end of the event say thank you, I love you, this works so well we achieved greatness will you be my ambassadors for the next time we do this and then the next time you do it maybe you'll have 300 people because multiple of those people who are sufficiently inspired can then take your message and amplify it further by word of mouth which is for me the strongest way to market something and getting people to feel invested in it as if they found this new community this community that believe in restoring the planet and not just I saw an advert in a magazine and it looked interesting and maybe I'll remember it or maybe I won't that I think is less effective is it worth building a marketing plan I'd say yes it is but finding the methodology that's going to allow for it to create that kinetic energy it's through word of mouth the people who believe in what you believe in yeah, thank you and then this one for me is quite an interesting one I've done so many builds where I've been on site from the bitter beginnings and for me what's key is making sure you've picked the right team for the build making sure you've got all the right tools to start that build efficiently and lastly making sure you look after yourself and your team from the start you could make a mistake of saying we've just landed and now we're going to build this big structure and that big structure and this kitchen how do we get to a place of feeling comfortable as a team so that if a big weather system moves in we know we're healthy and we're happy and we're looked after and we're motivated to continue working regardless of the weather situation so thinking about how does your roll up process go so that you ensure that both your team is taking care of and you go through the process of building everything else that's needed once you've taken care of your team I'd say start with your major structures and in fact don't really bring any team in that are focused on decor or focused on admin or any of that leave them in the village leave them in the city and allow for them to come in when it's necessary for them to come in start with those major structures the things that are heavyweight things that are hard to put up and then eventually get more nuanced teams to come in who are doing art or decor or things that would plug into kind of this bigger build I highly recommend that you leave a day in between the start of the festival and the finish of the build and in that day you can both have some rest time but you can also have some time to pause and go through all your health and safety stuff that's relevant to the flow of the weekend introduce all your key people or even the whole team if you can you know if you have the time and energy for it let's get everyone to feel like I see you I know who you are and now I know how we're going to be relying on each other to ensure that this is a real success story and by doing so you can create that unity you can create that pause moment to allow for us all to see each other and to feel like we're going to achieve this together thank you we're really nearly in the end now everyone thank you so much we've got a solid crew of people here they're still here and yeah I've just been dreaming about 14 there's 14 of you here 14 new restoration festivals being developed after this presentation before the event I full transparently I wrote all of the text here so I feel like I'm just going to be reading it out so it makes more sense for me sure unless you're getting tired no no that's fine so I think some of these I mentioned you know you have a big staff check-in I think that needs to happen every morning but it's good to have something like a big one that runs through every element you run through what happens in an emergency you run through all the different captains and how their flow is the schedules of every day we have an up centre and in that up centre you need to have on the wall all the different things and all the different teams and how they're going to be operating so that if someone didn't bring a notepad and pen they know they can go to the up centre okay my shifts are there there in there and I know who I need to report to and so it isn't the case that people are running around looking for these people we know exactly who's supposed to be working where and how the day is going to unfold and then obviously we're about to put on a show and I think that's quite an exciting thought and what happens before you put on a show you almost need to test things you open the tap and make sure the beer is cold you need to put the sound through the sound system and make sure that at the back of your arena space that it sounds crystal and it's delicious and it's coming through beautifully you go to the gate and ask the people at the gate are you feeling ready have you got your clear bag so that everyone who's going to be getting one for their recycling knows what to do with it have you got some sort of welcome sign have you got all the things that are going to allow for the full process because actually in putting on a show you need to consider each part of the journey that people are going to be going through and so it's important for you as the festival director to be able to live that journey and what I generally do is once I've had my team meeting in the morning then I'll have a restful walk through the sights I'll have lunch and just before gates open I will go right to the bottom of the festival site where the first car is going to enter and I'll check that all the signs are still up I'll check that all the flags are still up I'll check that there is parking stuff all the way from the bottom and I will walk the first car through the entire journey and make sure that everyone who's communicating anything about parking and entrance and ticketing and health and safety stuff and getting their bags and their tents to their respective camping sites and landing in the festival feels held and that everyone feels like they know what they're doing and I'd say do that a few times don't be in a position where you feel like ah it's working perfectly money disappears because there's a money box and the door's not open anymore and keep your finger on the pulse of the festival as much as the restoration Excellent advice and then during the event it's a good idea what we did at RegenFest was there was a different member of the core team each day who had a shift and that was generally doing the production so they had they knew who their team were for that day or for that period of the day they'd have a check-in with them at the beginning make sure everyone knows what they're doing there would be a clipboard so you'd know where each member of your team was in terms of the workshop areas the camping, the registration etc so yeah that's how we managed and then you make sure you do a clean handover handover with the people that are following after you for the next shift making sure there's high quality photography and videography happening throughout the event is really important this incredible shot here we hired a local photographer and we put that into the budget to create more local jobs and then we had amazing promotional photography to use after the event to sell what we didn't do another one but if we do we have the photos available same with videography we had someone who made a promotional film these are all really great promotional materials for the event moving forward for journalists to use when they are coming to write articles etc games to keep the energy high like Misha said and that's all that I have to say on that Misha anything else to add? no I think we can speak to it after the event yeah cool I think it's a critical thing to realise that that decompression is held really well and that decompression should happen from a few hours before people start packing up it's trying to understand how were people's experiences so making sure you've got some form that people can fill in right there and then a couple of volunteers walking around saying this is how my experience is this is how it could be improved these are my highlights it's reiterating that it's a waste free festival and that people need to take their rubbish home or they need to recycle it on site most years we put it out we put a big sign that says volunteer for your last meal help us with a strike and if we had 30 people on our team on the last day we might get another 30 people who really just don't want to leave just yet they've had a magic experience they'd like to add more value they don't want to feel like I'm not going to go here's a window would you like to stay for another meal would you like to stay for the last night it'll be just team enjoying the last of the beers we've got some extra food you're welcome to join us but please participate in the strike and then that extra energy of people who haven't been there for 10 days before comes in they're still inspired by all the planting and they can bring a little bit of extra value and then post the events we try and track as much as possible so we try and track how many people how much recycling was done how much organic material was composted how much solar energy did we capture pretty much every statistic we can get trees planted you name it we get all the stats and we make a really lovely diagram which we can then send to the sponsors and the partners and the participants to say success you were part of this, thank you it's easy to consume you can see the impact and you can see it from an events perspective too I think what's so beautiful about a restoration festival and events is it's immersive beyond anything else festivals have the opportunity to really capture you it's a temporary community I think most people have this vision of living in an intentional community one day, living surrounded by the people that have similar ideals and ethics as themselves and so to host a restoration festival of a hundred or a few hundred people, a thousand people what you're doing is you're creating the social experiment you're doing a lot of people together and make magic happen and test boundaries and so it's your job as a curator as a director to create that journey to balance it out to make people feel inspired held safe to capture that imagination it's a very special opportunity hosting a restoration festival and it takes a lot of thoughts and curating and you've got to work out harder channel those people through that journey and get them to be in a place of feeling like they're going to leave and say that was one of the best moments of my life because it can be, it really can be thanks Ash, thanks to everyone that was great, I really enjoyed that nice to share with everyone I feel like we captured so many golden nuggets of experience and advice here I'm going to stop sharing my screen now so we can all see each other after nearly an hour of an hour, what time we start four, an hour and a half yeah so questions does anyone have a question that they'd like to ask any of us I realise it's quite late now so if people need to run then go for it but we're still hanging on in here for anyone who wants to ask anything or say anything or just inspire us with the festivals that you're planning to do yeah we like to hear from you basically why did you come why is this interesting to you she does the question I just have to say I'm on two screens here I am inspired by all of this it's really the point is to get people to understand how possible this is this greater movement of ecosystem restoration and I'm totally down with making it fun of course I have a thousand questions and I know they're not going to get answered here but it requires on the scale that I think you're talking about it feels like it really requires some professionals like some people that I might know that have done this before I feel like this is but let me ask about scale let's say the smallest scale worth doing what do you consider where that economy of scales might work out in the country also in Los Angeles, an urban centre I think it would depend on on what it is that you're doing it for I mean are you doing it to make money because if you are then doing it on a larger scale makes more sense are you doing it because you want to have a wonderful time with your community in which case doing it on a smaller scale makes sense wherever you're doing it depending on the size of the land and the permits and permissions that you need and the costs, that will dictate to you what sort of scale makes sense anyway we did an event for 80 people in London just for the day and we organised, we did I think we met maybe once every two weeks for an hour none of us were really very professional we felt like a community event we didn't make any money out of it we covered our costs but what we wanted was to bring a lot of people into the river roading project which some friends of mine who were in the team had started they wanted more people to know about it they wanted to show the local council that there was a real interest in it that was the purpose and the context that should dictate what scale makes sense to you I mean just speaking up off the top of my head this is a new idea for us to consider so we're on a kind of a reconnaissance mission and I think I just first off want to thank you guys Ashley and Misha you did a great job of just laying it out I've got four pages of notes here to like you know show who might get enrolled all the things that need to be thought about but the you know our mission would really be twofold I'd say one to really get some work done on the land where this would happen and two is to just create a sense of awareness around the issue and making it fun with food and music is the way to go that's part of our motto Sorry about that I won't call this space if there's anybody else who has questions but if they don't my next question would be like the ratio of designing the work to the fund let's say Yeah We didn't want it to be too much of a just come and work thing because we didn't Unlike Misha's context of working in a forest we were working on a farm and so we were mainly working around the peripheries of the farm fields so therefore we didn't need to plant tens of thousands of plants and we wanted there to be lots of discussion happening between the people that were coming and to showcase what the region was all about so that's why we chose to have just two and a half hours of restoration in the morning and then workshops in the afternoon but like with Misha's context he had a lot more space and a larger restoration mission so yeah Do you want to say something Misha? Why did you choose to have the whole day the rest of the day? The reality is it's still got quite hot for us what we found was we were doing arrive on a Friday plant all day Saturday plant some of Sunday everyone hated me by the end so very fast learned that that was not an option and then what we did is we said ok well let's plant on the Saturday finish at lunch have a fun lunch bring some music in get high energy and then invite people to come back and plant again after lunch if they would like to what would often happen people would only arrive sometimes on Saturday mid-morning and so they would miss the planting anyway and so there was often another group and then there was 30 people who just like I came for the planting I want to really get as much planting and as possible and they would come back and we just have a target which we would have already assumed based on how many people are coming and say ok look we know we can get x amount of trees per this many people let's set this target so people have an aspiration to achieve that and then the Sunday would be the sacred day of learning and sharing and forest walks and being a restful day with no planting the only time we'd ever do planting on a Sunday is if like one of our partners came and they wanted to do like a ceremonious thing just independently and we could facilitate that maybe it was like a woman's day or a mother's day we might have a woman's circle and have one of the woman elders come and she could say something we plant an independently maybe a child's just been born so you could do something that like brings a tree planting elements to the next day but it's not this kind of hard work high energy rigmarole I'm seeing lots of hands Elizabeth was one of the members of the team for the regeneration festival Yes Likewise it's been a long time but thank you so much for your presentation it was super insightful we have two questions one of them is regarding like the legal matter like how you structure yourself are you an NGO company or how do you work that out What are the pros and cons into both being a non-profit or being a company I'm happy to answer that it's a complicated one sometimes so in our instance we have two businesses one is an NPC non-for-profit company and there we host the tree planting we fund trees environmental education we bring low income use to come tree planting on this side we have a business which we position as a social enterprise it can get sponsorship it can sell tickets which is a revenue generating activity and it can complement this so we don't draw a profit from here there's no dividends here it's really a service provider to this it's having tents marketing teams in an NGO didn't seem like it was diverting the energy of my programs team who are really just trying to focus on ensuring impact so we split them out and we work on it like that and it seems to have worked quite well for us nice, thank you then the other question is if you go to one place in your local community how do you reach out and how do you make your local connection with that place what are the challenges and some insights that you have gotten I mean there's just an infinite amount of challenges that could come up between language barriers and some people who just do not like trees because they believe it's for agriculture or maybe for religious reasons it's just a whole spectrum and my experience has been that you just need good community participation process you need to go there without too much of an agenda I've never been anywhere without being invited there's a reason why I'm going to plant trees in Amazon because I've heard that Amazon's spugged and that's not what my agenda would be I've been invited somewhere I'd get the person who's invited me to say can we set up a meeting with your local municipality with some of the local NGOs with anyone who's got an interest in restoration with a network of people and let's have a cup of tea together and sit in a circle it's their vision, where are their challenges how can we amplify the work that they're doing already so that it's not my story and my agenda so that it becomes a collective story, a collective narrative we can all believe in a similar journey and then you're going to come from a real place of strength and that's kind of how we've tried to do it my interns hate me for it but I don't like printing marketing material for an event so we create a black board and we hand paint every single logo in black and white so each logo is just white just so that it's not like this corporate Christmas tree of partners and because there's so many partners there's just hundreds of them and it's really by virtue of saying like let's try and get as many people's invited as possible and find where their niche is find the gap, find the thing that speaks to them and makes them feel invested in it most people want trees most people want to see ecosystems being restored you just need to find where the connection point is thank you so much, it's very insightful and can we have your email if you want to I'll put it in the chat the local people are concerned as well we did a new generation festival and with the positive trace party we did in London we made sure that the team the core team had people that lived in the area on the team and we created a paid job or paid jobs for them so that they automatically told all their friends and family all the people that live around the area about their new exciting job and they were automatically inviting all their friends and family to come we made sure that as many of the people as possible that were providing services were again from the local area stimulating more jobs and like Misha said just word of mouth the person who works at the local sound engineering company he tells all his friends and family and then all of a sudden we went into the local town like two weeks before we went into the hardware shop and they were like oh are you from that festival and they were really excited about it so allow the festival to champion the local place as much as possible so that everyone just feels really proud of the fact that it's there and that they see it as a really good thing for that place and the people that live there I think that's a comment rather than a question does anyone else want to ask anything I'm aware that we've been going for quite a while now so I'm happy to draw things to a close unless anyone has any more questions I'd be happy to end with something just to stimulate some imagination did you build hydrants is that for me I think it's about when you said make sure you have fire hydrants available fire extinguishers fire hydrants I've had the privilege of connecting with a lot of big European and UK festivals around trying to get them to a place of being invested in the restoration festival arena and I think that there's definitely hope in the future hopefully an opportunity for us to see conventional festivals have almost like a breakaway and move towards being a restoration festival we have those overseas with 80,000 people and much of it is dystopian destruction and just having a good old laugh but there's so much energy and there's so much money spent and I really believe that there's a huge opportunity for us as this collective to start filling the space to start filling that void and I'm already getting a lot of interest I've been speaking to Glastonbury Festival and Medicine Festival and quite a lot of the festivals that are really switching on to the idea that we need to make that shift and my hope is that maybe this is a team that we could go to a festival and say let's convert it from this kind of drunken brawl to something that's more in line with supporting functionality in these communities of ecosystems and individuals so we can restore individuals and get people to a place where we can go to a festival, we can have a drink but that doesn't mean to say that it needs to be a place we lose ourselves, it can be a place where we really find ourselves I totally echo that I think it's actually made me realise that it's quite a big thing to organise one of these festivals takes a lot of time, a lot of time and energy it's totally worth it but if you've never done it before maybe it'll be worth trying to find another event that's going on in your area and ask them if you can bring a restoration activity and initiative to that event as a way for you to practice to get your name known just to introduce the idea of doing a restoration as part of the festival I think that that would be a good idea before you launch into trying to organise a whole big event yourself which could feel like a big leap from 0 to 10 Susan I just wanted to say that when we did our first ecosystem restoration camp here in Paradise, California it kind of turned into a music festival anyway you know, at night we were all around the campfire and the cars came out and stuff so it would be better I think to plan it that way and then the quality of the music would be better I didn't know that you were with Camp Paradise we haven't met before it's nice to meet you it's nice to meet you too, thank you for doing this you're welcome, it was a lot of fun Conan, using the raise your hand function using the raise my hand button I'm an environmental officer at the local hand local small arts festival that sort of didn't happen this year or last year now that we've joined the ecosystem restoration camps thing as well so it's just actually to pick up on what Susan said we had a couple of volunteers around and yeah the same thing happened in the last couple of weeks so it is something that kind of takes on a life of itself just a bit what you were saying Misha about trying to piggyback or combine a small festival or a big festival into a restoration festival I'm wondering how would you start to go about that being the environment officer at a festival is very much about trying to manage waste and trying to educate people and it sort of feels almost like a losing battle but this sort of thing really inspired me into yeah it's planting trees or it's educating people on a more inspiring sort of level rather than trying to getting them to put the plastic in the right place you know it's a different level and I just wondering if you have any thoughts on that yeah I mean I suppose the thing is it's a cultural shift in its entirety and so you need to have the right nudges in place and those nudges come with either incentives so very clearly defined bins in very open places that ensures people can see what's going on and potentially there's some sort of incentive like Viva Canagua you know if you put your plastic cup someone's going to get a euro for a water project I think it helps if you also reduce the amount of pressure on the festival goes so you know if they have to pay for their cup and when it gets returned or if it's just a case of like everything that comes out of the festival that's been produced is compostable and then it can all go into the same place it's easy enough for me to say we're doing a festival we're calling it a zero waste festival nothing goes to landfill when there's only a thousand people but that for me has been a process of taking people on an extended journey we start off with a pre-communication we're doing it through social media as people arrive at the gate they're very aware it's a zero waste festival we stop all the music regularly and say okay can you see a cup can you see a bottle let's put it in the right bins everyone get busy and so people feel like they've taken on this journey and each iteration of the journey they're getting reminded that this is a collective responsibility when it gets to 10,000 people it's obviously a lot harder I'm thinking about trying to shift just the people that we've got already like that are managing the festivals that are running the teams using the format that you spoke about there and to running something like planting trees as well and to really take on the restoration element of it as well and to give over power to the programme to work in a way as well so I've been asked by have you had a boom festival in Portugal it's like a huge one I've been asked by a friend who works on the main team to think about bringing restoration elements into there and that's like such a would be such a huge opportunity and possibility the festivals in the summer though and it's quite a dry hour place so I don't think tree planting would really be very possible unless you brought in potted trees and it would just be really hard to do but the ideas I've had for weaving restoration into a normal festival are in other possibilities of activities you could do like making compost making compost tea, applying these things teaching people about hydrology and water catchments and digging earthworks together because there will be lots of hands and spades there could be some seeds that are ready for collection again it really depends on the time of year you could do talks in the schedule of workshops everyone that's marked or coloured green is about restoration you could have talks there could be bands that sing songs about it just look at all the different elements of the festival and how you can weave something about restoration in doesn't just have to be people digging or watering whatever it can be inspiration via poetry music speakers Susan? I just wanted to piggyback on too and say that one of the features that could be added would be an open mic because I think a lot of people would love to share their music as I was saying before and I've hosted open mics for 17 years and it's really amazing how supportive an audience can be for people who are getting up on the stage that aren't professional musicians and that's a dimension you can challenge people to do songs that are appropriate to the theme of the festival that's an idea too cool I'd like to draw it to your clothes now I have something else I need to do relatively soon I would like a comfort break it was a wonderful conversation and I'm glad that we managed to inspire and teach you and let us know if you plan to create a restoration festival of your own or activities within an existing one we'd feel very enthused and buoyed up by such news I think Misha did you want to pop your email in the chat if you're happy too yeah I did and those who already have and I will send the slides to the people who asked tomorrow and the recording will go on YouTube and feel free to share it with whoever and you like bye everybody thank you bye bye