This is a fantastic opportunity to see some great events, meet musicians, poets, and performers and work with our experienced team. Every year, the festival creates an amazing buzz around town and you can be part of it.
Become a part of our Welcome Team:
The first and last smiling faces that our festival audience will see each day, you’ll be providing front of house at the festival
- Welcoming festival-goers as they enter our Secret Garden
- Welcoming artists, poets, musicians and introducing them to the Host of the Artist Tent
- Being an Host of one of our venues: inviting people in, offering tea, making sure the space is tidy and welcoming and set up for the next event. Ensuring evaluation cards are filled in.
- Selling Tickets, Books and merchandise and giving out programmes
- Encouraging people to become Friends, Lovers or Partners of the Festival
- Dealing with audience queries: may be from the public, our audience or our sponsors
- Lost property
- Programme changes
You will be based in the Information Tent, the hub of all the comings and goings at the festival.
If you love the idea of interacting with a vast variety of people and getting really quizzed up on how a festival site is formulated then this is most certainly the role for you.
Event Management Team:
You’ll be working with our fantastic production team, offering a great experience of the logistical, hands-on, production side of a festival.
- Helping with the set up of the festival space and dismantling the space after the festival
- Looking after the installations around the gardens and making sure the space remains safe, clean and welcoming
- Ensuring that the venues (inside the gardens and across the city) are set up for each event, that resources are fully stocked and that the artists tent is replenished.
- Stewarding street performances and offering programmes to those enjoying these events.
- Ensuring evaluation cards are distributed and collected from events outside of the Secret Garden
- Managing the flow of people as they enter and leave the venue
Creative Team:
A team that finds itself spread across the site you’ll be helping in all sorts of areas:
- Helping create installations in the run up to the festival – making festival hats, folding origami and book-birds, making bunting
- Helping set up the festival site – transforming the gardens into a magical space where audiences are transported out of their day to day lives into somewhere quite extraordinary
- Leading or supporting on facilitation of workshops during the festival –such as lantern making, headdress making, puppet making, face-painting, pottery, book-bird making and more…
- If you a performer there are exciting immersive roles- bringing the family area to life through performance.
We are a very small team and value the support of our volunteers tremendously. Where possible we will put you in a position where you can attend the events you most want to see whilst volunteering and depending on the amount of time you are able to support, we will also give you some complimentary tickets to other events.
Because we have a small team we simply cannot organise lots of volunteers so we prefer it if you are able to help out for more than one day if possible.
The times we will need support:
In the run up to the Festival
Creative Team: We will be holding a number of making workshops over the next few weeks. We don’t expect the whole team to make every workshop but we would like members of the creative team to be involved in the process of creating props whether at home or at our studios in Bridge.
Thursday 3rd September
We like all our teams to be involved in the installation of the site | 10am – 6pm
Friday 4th September
- 10am - 2pm
- 2pm – 6pm
- 6pm – 10pm
Saturday 5th September
- 09am - 1pm
- 1pm -5pm
- 5pm – 11pm
Sunday 6th September
- 09am - 1pm
- 1pm -5pm
- 5pm – 11pm
Monday 7th September
- 09am – 1pm
Volunteers for the Creative, Events management and Welcome Teams must be over 18 years of age as of September 1st. However we do have opportunities for those between the ages of 13 – 17.
Hat Making Workshop:
We will provide you with a Festival T-Shirt and will be running a hat making workshop in the run up to the festival as all our volunteers will wear decorated festival hats during the event. We would love you to come and make your own – one that matches your personality. But, if you are not available then we will have a selection from which you can choose – large or small, subdued or garish…
This workshop will be on the afternoon and evening of Wednesday 19th of August with opportunities to come and make your hat any time between 14:00 – 20:00.
Interested?
If you are interested in a volunteering role contact [email protected] and put VOLUNTEER in the subject box of your email.