Keeping summer festivals safe
Our youth coordinator Gabriella Brayne reports on her Consent Club leadership work.
The Consent Club is a restorative-oriented, peer support system that works at festivals to promote a culture of consent. Our mahi has three focuses:
- education through kōrero and wānanga for festival goers;
- training volunteers to practice survivor-focussed, non-confrontational bystander intervention;
- and dealing with disclosures at festivals.
This year, we went to Soundsplash in Raglan, and Kiwiburn, a six-day participatory art festival, in Hunterville – two very different yet rewarding environments. At Soundsplash music festival, our team of fifteen awesome Consent Guardian volunteers each brought loads of positivity, compassion and personal insight to our kaupapa. It was awesome engaging with a relatively young crowd about the importance of practicing consent, not only in a festival environment but in all aspects of daily life. Festival-goers reported feeling safer by simply knowing we were available to help.
Our experience at Kiwiburn was equally positive because of the energy of our Guardian team, whom I was honoured to lead. One of our volunteers ran a workshop on practicing consent through theatre art – encouraging attendees to emotionally embrace the kaupapa of consent culture.
This year, we are looking to expand our work even further and encourage more volunteers to join our whānau. If you’re interested in joining or are keen to learn more, please reach out to us on our Facebook page ‘Consent Club’ or Instagram @consentclubnz
