Levelling the Field was a groundbreaking access programme at The Common at Glastonbury Festival 2024, led by Lyrix Organix in partnership with Music4Children. The collaborative programme enabled four disabled trainees and two mentors to help develop festival production careers at The Rum Shack, a late-night venue at the famous contemporary arts and music festival.
We interviewed Dan Tsu, Venue Manager and Programme Lead for The Rum Shack, Creative Director of Lyrix Organix and UK Council member with Creative UK. We learn more about the impactful initiative, which was officially funded and supported by Glastonbury Festival's ED&I programme. We also find out more about navigating the complex landscape of festival accessibility, how and why Levelling the Field was successful and leave with some valuable learning insights.
How central is diversity and inclusion to your work?
In terms of Lyrix Organix - it’s an organisation that's been running for 15 years. Creating equity and access has been fundamental to everything we do. Normally that's about working with marginalised communities, particularly those who are younger. At The Rum Shack at Glastonbury, equity and access have also been fundamental. It’s in our blood. It’s in our core.
Having a stage at Glastonbury is a tremendous honour and a privilege. There came a point at which we started to realise that we've got both the cachet and also the quality and expertise in-house and it felt like we had a responsibility to lead by example. We are at the most famous festival in the world and it's not a duty we treat lightly. Our social action and community action are as important as the music on our stage.
What are your long-term goals for affecting change in ED&I?
We’re in an interesting position because it's work that we've been doing since before the idea of ED&I as an acronym. It’s embedded in our work and always has been - it’s implicit, and people know us and respect us for that. We want to model change in the creative economy and to make people realise you can make change by starting small and scaling up. It can be bottom-up, not just top-down.
We are a defiantly grassroots independent organization. We're not particularly well-funded or well-resourced. We’ve survived pandemics, cost of living crises and austerity and one of our ambitions is to show that making change is still possible without the huge resources of a corporate or charity organization. All of us have the power to do something in this space, we just have to go and grab it and not be too inhibited by all of the structural constraints around it.
What do you think is the biggest risk of not addressing ED&I?
Aside from the personal impact on equity and access, one obvious risk of excluding people is the income that's being lost within the creative economy because we're excluding certain demographics.
Glastonbury is in a slightly privileged position because it’s going to sell 200,000 tickets in under an hour, whether there's an ED&I programme or not. That can be problematic because barriers exist even before the tickets go on sale, particularly if people have a perception that they can't access Glastonbury tickets - or, even if they're at the festival, they can't get around the festival. And that is exactly the reason why you begin excluding people without even realising it.
With Glastonbury being such a cultural beacon and such an influence on the creative sector on so many levels, far beyond music, there is a risk that by not acting, you're perpetuating what is seen as ‘normal’ in the Creative Industries.
Festivals are a huge challenge in terms of accessibility and that comes at an additional cost. Increasingly corporate events and public festivals are better resourced to create better access. But other tiers of festivals, like Glastonbury or your more grassroots festivals, can struggle. with everything in the creative economy, it leads to greater inequality. So, there's also a risk within the sector of having divergent ED&I standards depending on what budgets are available and perceived risks, including the bottom line. It’s a complex landscape that contributes to inaction.
What was the main problem Levelling the Field aimed to address?
It was a twofold problem. First, it was professional development opportunities in the festival and event sector for people with access needs; looking at the barriers they face and how we can reduce or remove those barriers. The second part of that was also to be bold and fearless, by turning a mirror back on our own work levelling up accessibility in the late-night area of Glastonbury (which is notoriously difficult).
How did you reach the community you wanted to engage?
For this pilot, we reached out to our extensive network of trusted partners, including Deaf Rave, who helped us secure some of the participants. Next time we run Levelling The Field, we plan to roll out a public outreach campaign because we see this as part of the overall Glastonbury promo campaign. This programme is exciting, and it deserves to be shouted about as much as the music. Not only are we saying, ‘Hey, we are holding the door open, who's up for joining us?’ but we’re also able to leverage that visibility both during and after the programme with social media and video content.
What did the programme involve?
It was a dynamic, tailored and structured programme with on-the-job training, mentoring and wraparound support. They were fully immersed in Glastonbury quickly! We had regular team briefings, tours of various venues and productions and live opportunities like managing the stage or artist liaison. One of the great unplanned outcomes was giving our participants and mentors last-minute opportunities to deliver talks, lead staff training (e.g. around language), as well as DJ and host the stage. Within three days the trainees were basically running the whole venue that we'd taken 12 years to learn! It was remarkable and demonstrated what people can achieve if we remove barriers and give them opportunities.
Because the programme was a pilot in a really complex environment, we wanted to keep it small and focus on quality over quantity so we could really get the knowledge, understanding and learnings from it. We were working with four participants initially, two of them from the deaf community, one wheelchair user and one with cerebral palsy.
We framed that with two mentors, one that was a mental health professional and one that has lived experience with disability. Pastoral support was a really important element of Levelling the Field and taking and adapting a lot of our youth work methodology. Everyone had a mentor, but they also had a buddy who they would have daily check-ins with.
What have been your biggest markers of success?
The feedback directly from the participants has been absolutely overwhelming and life-changing. They've been really vocal not only about the programme but also about the impact it has had on themselves. The outcomes manifested really quickly, which speaks to how impactful the programme was.
As an example, one of our deaf participants discovered their talent as an artist liaison because they've got this amazing energy that people really reciprocate. We also had another participant who is deaf but also an accessibility campaigner. She did a talk about Levelling the Field, on a scale she’d never done before (in The Temple!) and was able to talk about her work passionately and articulately. Enabling and empowering all of the participants was a hugely successful outcome for us.
We realised that there are many things that Glastonbury does incredibly well, but there are also some ‘blind spots’ (excuse the expression). As we were working on the ground, we could see some of those blind spots that maybe the festival couldn’t. So what's been really interesting is how influential this programme has been in thinking about some of the systems that Glastonbury Festival itself can now apply on a wider scale.
What do you believe made Levelling the Field successful?
I think our expertise in youth work was probably pivotal to the approach of the programme and part of adapting that was being dynamic and recognising complexities. Also, really bringing attention to detail and one-to-one care - not necessarily seeing the participants as one cohort, but seeing them as individuals with specific and perhaps complex needs that all have their own kinds of approaches. We wanted both the participants and the team involved to feel like they had freedom but that they were always going to be caught if they fell.
I think something else that made it successful was being very ready, very honest and very open about the reality that we will make mistakes and we're okay to make mistakes and we will own those mistakes. It speaks to being intrepid and fearless and having the confidence in knowing your environment, backed by an incredible stage team with empathy and expertise, especially somewhere as complex as Glastonbury.
What were your biggest learnings?
One of the key learnings is not to over-plan. Be responsive and mindful. There's a risk that people with less experience running youth-focused programmes might over-structure because they think it de-risks it and makes it a safer space. For us, it was about being dynamic and keeping things as loose as possible, but also having the confidence and the structure within the team so we knew we could cover and solve any problem. This is the magic space where youth development, training and festival production converge.
Also, it's knowing that information is important and how you disseminate that is crucial. Not everyone has the same kind of level of literacy or may have neurodivergencies that impact the way they absorb information. Go back to basics and think about how you communicate and who you’ll exclude if you fall back on certain types of communication like email. You need to give people a diverse approach to resources so that they can do whatever suits them best. We built digital libraries for staff and created closed-captioned instructional videos about everything from arriving at the gates to on-site transport.
I also would say don't get overly focused on being an ‘ED&I programme’. Not narrowing your focus to ED&I and actually understanding that ultimately, this is for the benefit of everyone. This reflects the social model of disability, which reminds us that it’s not someone’s disability that is the barrier, it’s the environment that we’ve created that is a barrier to us all.
If you’d like to learn more about Levelling the Field, please visit the Lyrix Organix website.
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