Surry Hills Festival 2008
This year I decided to volunteer at the Surry Hills Festival. The festival is the major fundraising event for the Surry Hills Neighbourhood Centre. The neighbourhood centre provides childcare, seniors & new immigrant’s activities, support, assistance and information for people who are underprivileged or marginalised in the local community. This, my friends is a good thing because not everyone has a mortgaged roof over their head, lots of friends to party with and their mental health.
So on Saturday morning (9:30am), Dave dropped me off at Prince Alfred Park and I made my way down to the Volunteer’s tent. My job was to be a spruiker and gold coin donation collector. I was given a megaphone and told to welcome people to the festival, ask for donations and tell people about the festival. I had done my homework before the event because I was taking the spruiker position seriously.
What I found interesting was that all the volunteers I met did not live in the Surry Hills area. Most of the volunteers were there because they “had to”, for example as part of their work experience for an event management course. I guess I’m disappointed that more people from the community didn’t make the effort to assist with the mammoth event that it was. Well at least they turned up in their thousands to enjoy the day. It seemed that there were a lot more volunteers earlier in the day, by lunchtime, there weren’t enough people to replace those who were on long shifts. I “worked” from 9:30am til 3:30pm and only got one break. So perhaps there needs to be an effort to encourage more helpers in the afternoon next year. The were more than a hundred volunteers doing all sorts of things like organising the dog show, setting up and bumping in as well as collecting donations. I only spoke to those collecting donations though.
As someone who has organised a few events myself, I could imagine what a freaking nightmare organising the Surry Hills Festival would have been. I was also informed that the festival was brought forward about 5 months due to the Council doing work on the park (which they later postponed, but it was too late to change the date). I really have to praise the organising team because unlike say: Big Day Out, Good Vibrations or V Festival, they aren’t doing this for their own profit. All the the money raised goes to the Neighbourhood Centre. I would say the 95% of people who turned up gave a donation of at least a dollar which is great. Though some people (who clearly didn’t look poor or underprivileged) tried to ignore the donation buckets being waved at them. It was a great day with beautiful weather, lots and lots of people and a good time was had by all (I hope).
Check out some pics here. They aren’t very good because I was busy volunteering and didn’t take my good camera.