Festival Angels are heading to Download Festival at Donington Park in June.
The teams of volunteers will be running Information Hubs based on campsites for the duration of the festival which runs from Wednesday 7th June through to Monday 12th June. Download Festival is an annual mammoth five day rock event and will include acts such as Metallica, Evanescence and Slipknot. Festival Angels is a Christian organisation who work at several major UK music festivals including Leeds Festival, Kendal Calling and Creamfields. Paul Blakey MBE, the founder of Street Angels and coordinator of Download Festival Angels, says, "This is our first year at Download which is the UK's biggest rock and metal festival attracting ninety five thousand festival goers. Festival Angels will be running two Information Hubs in camp site areas offering practical support and assistance. This is a great opportunity for the church to be visible at this major event and show that Jesus Loves Festivals." To sign up as a volunteer visit festivalangels.org.uk/download. Volunteers need to be aged 18+ and commit to 20 hours of volunteering over the 6 days. The clocks are changing, the weather is warming up which can only mean that FESTIVAL SEASON IS GETTING NEARER! Behind the scenes a lot of planning is taking place as we recruit, take references, plan, organise and coordinate the several Festival Angel teams. To keep everyone in the loop we thought a regular update would be good - so here is the first! Our first festival of the season is Porthleven Food Festival Festival Angels. This is in the Cornish coastal town and runs 21st - 23rd April. More details are in this video... Staying in Cornwall a local team will be at Tunes in the Dunes from 12th - 14th May. In Upton-upon-Severn Festival Angels teams will be out and about at a whole range of festivals from folk to jazz, blues to pop. These weekend events attract up to 30,000 people to this small town and Festival Angels will be running a cafe in Upton Baptist Church as well as detached teams out and about across Upton centre. If you would like to join the Upton team visit here. New festivals this year include Creamfields South where Paul Carr, rector in Billericay, is aiming to have a team over Spring Bank Holiday weekend. Contact us for more details. The next new Festival is the metal / rock Download which takes place 7th - 12th June in Castle Donnington. At Download we will be running the Information Hub based on one of the campsites. To join this team visit festivalangels.org.uk/download. A training night will be planned for May. The same weekend as Download is Parklife in Heaton Park, Manchester. We are currently working with Parklife to run safe place cabins across the site. More information soon! Next up are fourteen June and July gigs at Piece Hall Halifax. With acts such as Madness, Rag and Bone Man, James, Hozier and Sting the gigs will run in evenings. We have 45 volunteers signed up and so are currently at capacity. We will be sending out the rotas soon and setting up a training evening. Kendal Calling has become a favourite in the Festival Angels calendar. Running 27th - 30th July in Lowther Deer Park, Penrith the team will be running a Safe Space at the intersection of several campsites alongside detached teams out and about across the festival site. We have 49 volunteers signed up so again are at capacity! Next up we are supporting Creationfest, a free Christian festival in Cornwall, to recruit volunteers for stewarding, etc. You can find out more and sign up by clicking here. At the end of August, around the Bank Holiday, we have teams at both Leeds Festival and Creamfields North (and the Upton Sunshine Festival and Street Pastors at Reading). The team We Are Church at Creamfields handed out at least 2800 jammy dodgers along with litres of water. The team are expanding the work they do each year, follow them at www.facebook.com/wearethechurch3 Leeds Festival, our biggest Festival Angels team with at least 170 volunteers, happens from 23rd - 28th August. Teams will be running a Prayer Cafe, Lost Property, Detached and the Chariot serving cuppas to security staff at night. We are currently on 110 volunteers and so if you plan to be at Leeds sign up soon at leedsfestivalangels.org.uk/volunteer . You can find out more about what we do at Leeds in this video (and please share the video on your social media to help attract more volunteers - https://youtu.be/ZeQxJlYk2Xc ) We are working with other areas to help teams run Festival Angels at smaller festivals including in North Wales. Street Angel teams will also be joining together across regions and with other organisations to run at Festival Angels style teams at events such as Royal Ascot. ROC Angels can help and provide resources if you want to do this in your locality - get in touch with us!
You may want to pray for Festival Angels - click here for a prayer that was on UCB radio in December. You can join the Facebook group and follow us on social media (we are @festivalangels on FB, TikTok, Twitter and @festivalangels1 on Insta). Thank you to those who have signed up to volunteer! Thank you to those who are busy working behind the scenes. More information will be out soon from each of the different festival teams.
As part of a week where UCB1 (a national Christian radio station) lunchtime Hour of Prayer featured the work of ROC Angels, the Tuesday slot was around the work of Festival Angels. Listen below:
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A GROUP of churchgoers has been providing a safe space for Creamfields ravers for the past four years. Members of We are the Church first approached Creamfields organisers in 2016 to ask if they could be there to offer support and provide a relaxing space for festivalgoers. “We’d heard about the work of Festival Angels at other events and wanted to do something similar for our local festival,” said organiser Rev’d Jane Proudfoot from St Wilfrid’s Church in Grappenhall. This year was the fourth time the We Are Church tents made an appearance on the Daresbury fields. The team is made up of volunteers from Warrington and Runcorn from a wide cross-section of local churches. As well as offering a calm and relaxing space and a space to chat for festivalgoers, We are the Church also give out thousands of cups of water over the four-day festival period. “We are there to listen and to let people at the festival know they are loved and cared for,” said Rev’d Jane. “We give out thousands of cups of water over the four days of Creamfields and have amazing conversations. “We want the young people who attend, many of whom may never have been to church, to go away knowing that the Church cares about them.” One grateful festivalgoer made a visit to the church tent and expressed their gratitude on social media. “Just wanted to message and say how amazing the church was at Creamfields this weekend,” they said. “It really was mine and my friend’s safe space with such inspirational volunteers who should be so proud of themselves for helping the people that they do. “It is genuinely amazing! “Keep doing what you are all doing even when it seems tough because you don’t realise how many people’s lives you’re changing. “God bless you.” The volunteers feel ‘privileged’ to be able to work alongside the organisers of the festival and to be part of ‘Creamfields Cares’ which supports the welfare and wellbeing of everyone on the site. Pastor and organiser Jonny Masters, the family and children’s advisor for the Diocese of Chester, said: “The Creamfields Team are incredibly helpful and generous to us, and we couldn’t do what we do without their help and support.” The church team was ‘distressed’ to hear about the death of a young woman from South Wales after she fell ill at Creamfields 2022. Kim Wellens, who works for Warrington Youth for Christ and also helps to organise the volunteers at Creamfields said: “Her family are in our thoughts and prayers. “No one can fail to be affected by such sad news, we want everyone to stay safe.” The volunteers operate entirely on donations from the local churches. To find out more, to donate to We are the Church or to find out about volunteering contact wearethechurchatcreamfields@hotmail.com |