The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #163325   Message #3895347
Posted By: Tattie Bogle
22-Dec-17 - 08:32 PM
Thread Name: What's Happening to our Folk Festivals?
Subject: RE: What's Happening to our Folk Festivals?
Steve G has hit it with "succession planning". I was one of the main organisers of a festival for 6 or 7 years: 2-3 of that before I retired from a very busy job, and the rest after. I indicated that I wanted to retire after 5 years, but, really there was no-one to carry it on, although we had a good number of people come on Committee that year, but they were just not ready yet to take on running a festival. But they all knuckled in and got better at making their own decisions in the succeeding years.
In my final year as Festival Coordinator, I did my best to pull together all the threads, contacts, forms, risk assessments, insurance docs et al, which had previously been dispersed among different Committee members, and put them all together in a single (Multi-faceted!) Festival Handbook - in electronic version so that any changes could be rapidly incorporated. As as I retired eventually after 3 years of trying, everyone on that Committee then got a copy of said handbook on a CD-ROM. However, as I had said I didn't mind being contacted with any queries during m first year off Committee, I often got such enquiries as "How do we contact so-and-so?" "All in the Hand-book" said I, to which, "What Handbook?" Bah, gah, doh, banging heid off wa'!! But have to say that succeeding years have been good if different!