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In my attic is a trestle made from a twenty year old wooden sign, never painted over. It reads ‘This event has cost over £3000 to stage. Please give generously.' The idea that Nottingham Green Festival could cost this much surprises some people. It is, after all, a bunch of people in a field. Actually, the project's less obvious aspects make it more interesting.
The Green Festival started as the Peace Festival very early in the 1980s, as an annual Sunday outdoor gathering. Woodthorpe Park was used before Victoria Embankment was settled upon. Admission has always been free: at various times there have been programmes, but never tickets. Costs are met from stall rental fees and by grant aid from local councils. The organisers are volunteers.
Two major factors shape the whole thing. One, of course, is shortage of funds. It means the very existence of the event is uncertain until well into the year - by which time deadlines for inclusion in Council-based publications are invariably missed. This explains why you don't find any reference to the festival in local events guides. The adverts in the Evening Post for three preceding days use a big part of the total budget. Nevertheless, the Green Festival achieves a better attendance than other similar events which invariably turn out to have cost much more.
The other big determining factor is volunteering, both its potential and its limitations. If all the jobs were done by paid workers, and all the things hired and bought, we couldn't afford it. If everything was done by volunteers using borrowed equipment, it would need more people, with more free time, than are available to us. The only answer is to balance volunteering (and borrowing and ‘help in kind') with actual hiring of things and people. But what do I mean by ‘limitations of volunteering'? This isn't, by the way, a grumble about shortage of helpers. Often people express surprise to me that more use isn't made of volunteers. ‘You could surely get teams of students to do that...’ Charities and other organisations manage it, after all. A friend staging arts events has a phrase for good volunteers in her office: ‘low maintenance'! Volunteers are worthwhile provided the effort they save is not exceeded by the effort of training, supervision and intercommunication. Suitable projects need to have several fairly self-contained
areas of responsibility, and they need to last long enough to include, in voluntary sector jargon, an induction period. Many charitable schemes do fit these criteria – the Green Festival not so well. Its responsibilities are short, intensive, technical and interrelated. The Peace Festival team in the eighties would undergo near-despair as one person's job was held up until they learnt the outcome of someone else's efforts (to be fair, that was before mobile phones).
But where's the money spent? Advertising has already been mentioned. Doing without at least one marquee is risky in the UK - seeing the hard work it takes professionals to put up and take down a 30 by 40 footer puts the cost into perspective. Tables and chairs – in their hundreds – also indispensable. At one time we borrowed them, but loading them on and off vans got too tiring for the few organisers (another point about volunteer recruitment – it should have educative or work-experience value, not just be cheap labour).
Live music gives the festival character. The musicians perform for modest but reasonable fees, less than they'd get elsewhere, but not for free. With the move from the Embankment field to the roadway, we use the bandstand in place of a hired tautliner lorry stage. The musical sound engineer's fee is well-earned by his expertise, equipment and speed.
The rest of the costs come under ‘miscellaneous'. Insurance – an outdoor public event must insure for a disaster claim of over £1 million: for this our premium is £250 (they don't offer a no-claims bonus). Ground staff deserve special mention. These Council employees staff the roadblocks, rope off and staff the car park, manhandle litter drums ... and in the event of downpour, their tractors rescue vehicles and gear from muddy fields. Their 6 am Sunday start definitely classes as ‘unsocial hours'.
In giving this account I hope not to seem obsessed with money, or, in explaining the causes behind the event's drawbacks, to sound complacent. The organisers have always kept the aims of peace and environmentalism uppermost. This year's event had slightly fewer stalls than before, probably through a stronger-than-ever rumour of closure, but noticeably more visitors, and comments have been complimentary. Another hidden aspect is the new skills organisers develop, by necessity. Or so I've found, but perhaps I was more ignorant to begin with.
Jeremy Jago
Nottingham CND
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