Reconnect Festival
The Reconnect Festival held in August 2022 at the Folkestone Quarterhouse was, in many ways, our most ambitious project to date. We set out to put on a music festival for young people, and we wanted young people to help us design and plan it.
Over the course of a few months, we worked with a group of young people from across Kent, who took on all sorts of roles and responsibilities – from general ideation for what should be included, to booking bands, recruiting volunteers, and helping out with marketing and photography! We saw the festival as a great way to give the group some real, hands-on work experience, as well as a palpable sense of ownership in a large-scale community event.
Our youth panel was recruited through the National Citizen Service’s Change Maker program, which is run jointly in Kent by the Charlton Athletic Community Trust and Ingeus. After speaking with both organisations and confirming that they were on board with our plans, we invited the brilliant, passionate and diverse mix of young people they worked with to join us as consultants.
We held regular meetings both in person and virtually in the run-up to the festival. We were blown away by these young people’s creativity and overall vision for the event. It was a pleasure to work with them and it’s safe to say Reconnect’s success is in large part down to their inspiring energy and boundless imagination.
We also reached out to our vast array of school contacts across the county to find young people who were interested in filling some specialist volunteer roles for the festival, including photographers and videographers to capture the event, and journalists to write and record press releases issued to local newspapers and radio stations reporting on the event.
For the photography and videography roles, we worked with a local production company that ran workshops and provided training for young people ahead of the festival, as well as collaborating with them to edit and release the footage afterwards. Participants in the workshop also shot videos of themselves and their classmates reminiscing on their experience of lockdown, and how they have felt reintegrating into a post-pandemic world. This footage was displayed in a function room during the festival.
For those interested in journalism, the University of Kent ran workshops at their campus in Medway, offering hands-on experience in their TV studio, radio station, and news office, and teachings on how to construct a written news piece for a paper or magazine.
The festival went brilliantly, with over 350 young people attending. All tickets were provided completely free of charge, and we had live music from five local bands, a Playstation room, a popcorn machine, a photo booth, and much more!
We were delighted when, after the festival, many of our youth panel reported they were interested in careers in the creative industry and event management as a result of their involvement in planning Reconnect. We’re excited to see the great things they’ll undoubtedly go on to do and will be happy to provide references for them when they apply for their first jobs.