Following
the Action Plan of the project KA425 which covers a certain effort to be
undertaken to collect the best practices and relevant experiences accumulated in the Nordic
countries in the field of education and training of cultural managers, the
representatives of the KRIMEL PetrSU, took part in a study trip to Roskilde, 3-8
July, 2013, that made it also possible to attend the last 3 days of the
Roskilde Festival 2013.
There is no
need to say that the Roskilde Festival can itself be a worthwhile object for
research and studying. Established in 1971 as a small / local event, it grew up
to be the biggest and most prestigious outdoor music festival in Scandinavia,
having seen the likes of U2, The Kings, Prince, Guns N’ Roses down the years,
also Rihanna, Metallica and Slipknot performing in 2013. Annually the Roskilde
Festival attracts thousands of visitors and tourists from all over the world.
The inhabitants of Roskilde are very much dependent on the Festival, which is
the main driving force for the economic well-being of a whole municipality.
The reason
to make a study trip to Roskilde has been multifold. On the one hand, the
Roskilde Business College has a reputation of an advanced educational
institution offering a variety of programmes / courses which
develop students’ skills and expertise in mastering the creation and management
of events. On the other hand, the Roskilde Festival, being one of
the best known “products” of the creative industries in the European North, might
be seen as a good example for KA425. The Roskilde Business College and the
Roskilde has been successfully cooperating for a number of years, and both of
them accumulated valuable experience in event organization and management,
sustainable regional development and cultural tourism.
The Roskilde
Business College, which hosted the Russian visitors, organized the seminar “Sustainable
Event Management and volunteer coordination – and backstage tour at Roskilde
Festival.” The seminar consisted of two parts: two-day workshop and walking
tour at Roskilde Festival area. The workshop was dedicated to the management
issues in culture on the example of Roskilde Festival, and to the technologies
of coordination and motivation of volunteers.
As a special
focus of a study-trip has been on the best practices in the sphere of volunteer
training and coordination the Russian visitors received an opportunity to meet with
and listen to the volunteer leaders in charge for management of volunteers
serving the various tasks at the festival. During the “backstage tour”, offered
by the Roskilde Festival on a commercial basis, the visitors from KRIMEL
witnessed how the various festival issues, such as the safety measures, PR and
media coverage, ticketing and cleaning, and many other, have been handled by
the volunteers.
The most
striking thing at Roskilde Festival was that it had more than 30 000 (!)
volunteers. (For the comparison it is only 20 000 volunteers serving the World
University Games in Kazan 2013). The Roskilde Festival volunteers take part in
implementation of different tasks of different levels. It was emphasized that
large part of volunteers has many years of experience at Roskilde Festival and
spend their annual holidays there. Many do it with their families. And some of
the volunteers come from the foreign countries.
In Roskilde
this small army of volunteers is grouped, using the military terminology, into
8 large brigades, each consisting of between 3000 and 5000 volunteers. Each
brigade, responsible for a particular service area at the Festival, is chaired
by 2 volunteer leaders who report only to the Head of the Festival Organising
Committee.
The Roskilde
Festival has a unique system of well-organized work with volunteers. All of
them pass an examination and receive instructions. Every volunteer has its
group with a manager who is responsible for decision making and who should
report to a supervisor. The Supervisors inform about the situation the
respective Volunteer Leader. This is a multistage hierarchy, which is under
control of the Organising Committee of Roskilde Festival.
The Russian
visitors were curious on what makes the people living in the Nordic (wealthy) countries
to volunteer. What makes a person, who has other regular and time-consuming assignments,
such as running a career, raising
family, not to mention taking care of aging parents, going to the gym, and
keeping up with e-mail, to work, at least, 32 hours in addition to the hours
spent for training, introductions, instructions at the Roskilde Festival? Only a
selfish human desire to get a free ticket or/and access to the after parties or
backstage zones where the music stars or other celebrities might appear? No, that’s
not the case of Roskilde. The
volunteers coming to Roskilde are truly committed, as they are willing to
help create something and make a difference – that makes up the festival.
The Roskilde
Business College and Roskilde Festival have worked together for three years to
create a training course titled “Project Management in Practice” for volunteer
leaders. A total of more than 75
volunteer leaders have so far attended the course, equivalent to 10 ECTS of the
bachelor’s programme.
The pointed training
course has contributed to the development of a model for the management of
volunteers, which is also used for self-management and managing people who
manage themselves. A key challenge with managing volunteers is that only
positive sanctions are available, since the negative, such as reducing salary,
transferring the employee or firing the employee have no effect, as volunteers
are not hired in a normal sense. The trick is to find a balance between
administrative management and communicative leadership.
But what
stimulates people to become volunteers? Having returned from Roskilde, the representatives
of KRIMEL say that the volunteers are inspired by many things, including but
not limited to:
- A well-respected line in CV getting extra points in the eyes of a potential employer; Adding volunteer experience to a resume shows a commitment to helping others or to working in a particular field;
- Working side by side with professionals, enhancing one’s network of professional contacts;
- Social communication – the volunteers have fun together; find friends and boy-/girlfriends;
- Professional ambitions – people, especially the youngsters, receive an opportunity to get work experience and training in different professional spheres;
- Ownership and participation – people become a part of great movement; they think “it is because of me”.
Undoubtedly,
there are always those who do not share the original values, beliefs and ethics
of volunteerism, and those who make themselves inspired by an idea to get a free
ticket. And the Roskilde Festival is not an exception in this case, thought
those few pseudo volunteers are never invited to come back next year.
What
concerns KA425, a study-trip to Roskilde made it possible for the Russian
visitors to get an inside look and in-depth understanding of how the volunteers
are managed at such comprehensive event like the Roskilde Festival. The
valuable lessons learnt during 40-year running of the Roskilde
Festival would be capitalized and summarized in the training programmes to
be designed and run for the culture professionals in the Republic of Karelia
and Oulu.
In
KA425 the youngsters and volunteers have been selected as special target groups
for the project simply because that it is believed their possible input in the
cultural process running in the local municipalities is underestimated. The
formal and informal groups of youngsters, also the school / college /
university students, and volunteers, if engaged in the community cultural life,
may contribute significantly to the cultural events running in the peripheral
municipalities. The knowledge and expertise transferred from Roskilde might
help to create a signal for the youngsters for more commitment, active citizenship
and participation in the municipal development, also in the cultural sector.
These best
practices and pedagogical models of coordinating and training of volunteers developed
at Roskilde should be critically analyzed, and, if possible, transferred to the
Republic of Karelia and Oulu. It is envisaged in the KA425 that a brochure
containing the best EU practices in the field of festival production and event
management will be published in one thousand copies and distributed to all the
relevant stakeholders.
DEnis A. Pyzhikov,
KRIMEL PetrSU (Lead partner for the Project KA425)
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