Water Aid at Glastonbury Festival
2003 was a record-breaking year for WaterAid at Glastonbury. Once again the Festival gave us a unique opportunity for a huge boost in funds and awareness raising, which was topped off by a fantastically generous donation of £100,000 from the Eavis family, enough to provide over 6,500 people with safe water, sanitation and hygiene education for life.
The warm weather meant a high demand for WaterAid’s watering can showers from hot and grubby Festival goers whilst a brief shower ensured that WaterAid’s high quality macs were sold out within hours! All in all we received a staggering £10,000 in donations from Festival-goers, over double what we rasied the year before. Many festival-goers were seen sporting WaterAid’s t-shirt featuring an exclusive print of Glastonbury by official Glastonbury artist, Kurt Jackson.
For the first time the WaterAid banner on the Pyramid and Other stages showed equal prominence with the other two festival charities, Greenpeace and Oxfam and WaterAid’s backstage media team outdid themselves this year with a giant poo costume, complete with fly. The turd brought in lots of press interviews and photographs, and introduced itself to numerous celebrities.
WaterAid worked with Glastonbury on a poster campaign around the site to discourage urinating in the hedges and streams and our “turn off the tap” and “wash your hands” posters promoted our important messages all over the Festival site. WaterAid’s volunteers had a fantastic time and are already looking forward eagerly to next year!
Emily Boyd-Carpenter
Corporate, Events & Project Funding Manager
Glastonbury Festival is a major highlight of WaterAid's year. The money raised at the festival and donated by Glastonbury Festival is invaluable in our work, and the profile we gain from our involvement is priceless.
Glastonbury provides an ideal opportunity for WaterAid to talk to members of the public about the importance of access to safe drinking water and hygienic toilets, as these are priorities for festival-goers.
What Glastonbury Festival does for WaterAid
- WaterAid's African style pit-latrines deliver clean, safe toilets and enable people to learn more about WaterAid's work. There are 2.2 billion people in the world with nowhere to go the toilet - Glastonbury Festival enables us to take this message to members of the public and enlist their support through donations and awareness raising.
- The WaterAid banners on the Pyramid stage and the Other stage were featured in many photos and on the TV coverage - we know that lots of people saw them! This is great for raising our profile - priceless advertising for WaterAid!
- Glastonbury Festival provides WaterAid with a free stand, right next to the Pyramid stage.
From there we hand out drinking water to festival goers, who often give a donation in return for this service. This also gives us an opportunity to tell them more about WaterAid's work, and how they can help to provide clean water fro some of the 1.1billion people in the world who do not have access to it.
- Glastonbury has introduced us to a number of celebrities, journalists and VIPs. For example, we met Kurt Jackson, the Glastonbury artist, who is donating some of his paintings, which will be sold in an auction to benefit WaterAid!
- Glastonbury Festival provided a fantastic opportunity to highlight our campaign "Water Matters". This was a huge success for us - we collected over 10,000 signatures for our petition calling for an international target to halve the number of people without sanitation by 2015. A few days after the festival, the entire petition of over 100,000 signatures was handed in to John Prescott at 10 Downing Street, just before the World Summit for Sustainable Development in Johannesburg - where the sanitation target was finally achieved!
- In addition to the drinking water giveaway at the main stage, WaterAid provided sanitation and hygiene services to the whole Glastonbury Festival site: our posters reminded people of the importance of washing hands after using the toilets, and also asked them to turn off water taps after use. These eye-catching signs were posted on toilets and tap stands everywhere, to help keep Worthy Farm and the festival goers clean and safe.
A child dies every 15 seconds from water-related diseases - a shocking statistic, especially when so much can be done. Less than £15 can provide a person in the developing world with a sustainable supply of water, access to sanitation and hygiene education.
The donation WaterAid receives from Glastonbury Festival is vitally important in helping to prevent deaths and the spread of disease, and dramatically improve the quality of many people's lives.
In 2002 WaterAid received almost £50,000 from our association with Glastonbury Festival!
This is in addition to the priceless publicity and awareness raising and opportunity to spread our water, sanitation and hygiene education work to a new audience in a fun and meaningful way.
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