Brandi Veil – Ambassador for Transformational Events that Promote Sustainability
I thought readers would be interested in a presentation that a friend of mine, Brandi Veil, made recently at the 21st United Nations Conference on Health and Environment: “Global Partners for Global Solutions.” Brandi is a wonderful person with a heart the size of Texas. She bills herself as an “Ambassador for Transformational Events,” and she really does have a considerable flair for pulling people together.
Again, here’s a transcription of her talk to the audience. If, after reading this, you’d like to get involved, please let me know.
I am here today as an Ambassador of the festival culture to present you, a new audience, with new possibilities via new systems. I am a Hollywood event producer who was influenced by transformational festivals and has now made it my life’s mission to expose the many gifts of this community! I am here to alert you to a generational shift in global society driven by art, music and dance; and, to share with you a plan to guide these individuals into your organizations and communities to create a new type of workforce with new skill sets and values along with a plan, which I call “humanitarian sustainability”. WIT has invited me to present to you a possible means of developing and sustaining resources for the programs this conference has occupied itself with for over 20 years–Health and Environment.
I may not be speaking about nuclear power or energy conservation, however I am here speaking about energy—the energy and power of community!
Starting with music festivals like Woodstock 43 years ago here in New York State and growing with the very different, arts-oriented BurningMan Festival for the past 35 years, there are now what we call “Transformational Festivals” throughout the world which focus exclusively on transforming their participants’ lives through their exposure to new values, means and methodologies.
What if I told you these festivals are quadrupling not only in size but also in influence? Woodstock was the launching pad for music festivals, which would be sustained and transformed into other areas of social movements. Last year, a festival called Coachella in a desert community near Palm Springs, CA brought in a record-breaking $47 million over two weekends with 90,000 people attending and The Electric Daisy Carnival, a dance-music fixture in Las Vegas, drew more than 300,000 people over three days. What we are witnessing here is occurring on a global scale and some are calling this generation “the festival generation”. {Slide 6} What if I said tens of millions of attendees will engage in festivals next year and these millions of people can be guided to a greater and more focused purpose?
Commercial interests have been well aware for many years of just how potent and influential a force these festival goers can be–not only in the case of a company like Google, which has sent as many as 2000 employees at a time to BurningMan in the remote Nevada desert to encourage “new thinking”, but with companies interested in developing new markets for their products.
The integration of such festivals has influenced mainstream markets through the use of crowd funding and crowdsourcing, and is now a $470 billion industry. BurningMan has contributed to emerging markets for example has devoted an entire website to projects involving Social Entrepreneurship an area which encompasses virtually every activity used to sustain an enterprise.
I believe your programs and goals can be integrated with these movements and, increasingly, major corporations and NGOs. This can be a positive source of sustaining the ever-increasing demand for human and material resources, which you need to succeed in your own programs.
The example of Muhammad Yunus’ work at The Grameen Bank making loans to individuals and organizations is one which everyone here is well aware of. Of even greater potential import is the work of companies like Goldman Sachs and internet-based portals like Kick Starter, crowdfunding and crowdsourcing. These have the ability to marry capital with social enterprises in far greater numbers than ever imagined.
This new genre of festival, the transformational music and culture festival, has been growing in the United States and globally. As a counter to mainstream festivals focused solely on profit, this type of festival is influencing millions of new participants. Woodstock and, later, Burning Man, “the mother of transformational festivals”, have been evolving for over 4 decades. These communal activities are fostering a new generation; a generation that contributes to sustainability through “community” or common purpose; and, a social ecology through art, music, film, education, healing and philanthropy.
Because of its power to transform the lives of its attendees, such a festival is aptly called a “transformational festival,” forming a new type of culture. Over the last 40 years, these “Love Festivals” have been evolving and over time merging with current technologies to create a far more impactful social change. As a result, a new type of citizen is evolving: a first-generation model being connected to others, the community, and the environment. There is an awareness of self, of others, and The Earth. This model is producing the next generation of philanthropists; and our children are becoming the “generational stewards of the Earth”. At present, every weekend of the calendar somewhere in the world a transformational festival is held with thousands of attendees seeking information and hoping that they can be led to become more proactive members of society.
I will point out, that there is not enough data on these events leading to social transformation. The movement is evolving so fast that more research is needed to measure its long-term impact. At transformational festivals we are seeing social economic structures that are being created and are not currently being adequately tracked.
What we do know is that festival economics has influenced companies like Facebook, Kick Starter and Google– companies using crowdfunding and crowdsourcing, create a substantial financial and social movement. Social engagement fosters community and is now changing our world. We now need to find out if that has impacted economies and societies.
I was inspired to create purpose-driven events after going to BurningMan in 2010. I produced many events– among them was a weekly gathering in the heart of Hollywood called Grateful Fridays, which Friday marshaled attendees to become ambassadors of this new social ecology, and of course volunteers. In 2011-2012 attendance was over 60,000 and over 5,000 ambassadors featuring celebrity musician Jason Mraz who launched our event getting us recognized nationwide, including the LA Times, CBS News, the LA Weekly and Rolling Stone Magazine. The goal was to bring consciousness to the mainstream audience using nightlife, based on the foundation of inclusivity and a gift economy of barter, trade and donations modeled after BurningMan. I have seen first-hand the transformation that such events produce in others: a sense of interconnectivity, of community, a zeal to volunteer, an awareness of sustainable practices, and a desire to have a greater consciousness.
Simply put, my goal is to marry those seeking to be transformed with your organization to educate and engage these millions of interested people worldwide into a positive force that can affect change in health and environmental programs around the world. We can see this happening in other areas of transformation markets like green and healthy products emerging market.
On-Line’ Retail market during the 2010 attracted $38.5 billion, up 14.2% from $33.7 billion the previous year. Green and healthy products account for $209 billion in sales, with that figure reaching more than $400 billion by 2010.
Emerging Market Economies (EME) are nations with social or business activities in the process of rapid growth. EME’s constitute approximately 80% of the global population, representing almost 20% of the world’s overall economy.
By marrying transformational and music festivals, with the structure of your organizations we would be assisting in an “Emerging Market of Transformation” for better– Health and Environment.
I see marshaling the festival community to continue its transformation by contributing to sustainability efforts currently in action and in creating new ones where they don’t exist. Festival attendees aged 18–35+ can be led to volunteer their efforts in a new kind of mission for global activism, aligning with established NGOs, communities and with local government officials.
The requirement for a better educated work force, more sensitive to the environment, with an ethical approach to work is compelling changes in how we communicate with and educate people in all of the UN member states no matter what the dictates of their particular political or economic or social systems require.
The effective use of new media by transformational festivals can be a useful model for others to follow and also for the many groups and communities you all represent to access these millions of festival goers as volunteers, potential employees, underwriters and supporters of your work.
These festival audiences can be taught the knowledge and skills they need through online communities, new means of communication and mobile technology at music festivals in order to participate in a new, better-connected form of goodwill. The process that starts before the festival and continues on during and after is in itself ‘transformational’. What is being produced is a more informed and engaged individual. It’s up to you to provide the content that this person is exposed to.
This leads to the creation of a network, which can be sustained by a number of new approaches like crowdfunding, crowdsourcing, point-based systems to sustain these engagements– about which I would be more than happy to discuss with you in greater detail. I have already begun a program to invite NGOs and local government workers to join me in creating a developed and easy-to-manage network of partners which will share information and which can be accessed through a new website or directly at the various festivals. Information is critical, and the education of the festival audiences can only be as impactful as the cooperation coming from international partners. These programs would help to provide a sustainable platform for economic, social, environmental and the integration of new systems to people who participate.
The “How to get there?” is critically important – and I propose that you consider a mix of what is called Crowd Sourcing, Crowd Funding, Time Banking, and a Volunteer Credit Bank, for future discussion. This is all going on at present in MANY OTHER COMMUNITIES and INTEREST GROUPS and you are in a position now to be in the forefront of this development.
As I mentioned, many of the statistics are being studied and will be of great use to you and your organizations. One of the areas of inquiry I would like to explore is how these festival-launched communities have worked with your groups. Next year, I expect we will have better data given the speed with which this field is evolving.
I will make myself available to you and we can discuss how better to advance these concepts!
I leave these words with you: At the soul level, on the energy level, we can feel that we are all the same. We are connected in some way. Now we must be willing to harness the new world that is waiting for us and bridge the gap from old world to new world.
