Your City Festival is a Stoke-On-Trent based music and arts festival. It takes place across a variety of venues, clubs and restaurants in Stokes city centre, Hanley, on May bank holiday weekend every year. The festival was founded in 2016 and is organised by a team of local musicians, entrepreneurs and creatives, fronted by festival organiser Ben Nixon. Local bands are joined by out-of-town headliners for a weekend of music, culture and entertainment.
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Your City is heavily inspired by other music festivals in the UK, particularly Liverpool Sound City, and aims to both highlight Stoke’s musical talent, and bring bands and artists into Stoke - a city which is frequently missed from UK tours, meaning that fans from Stoke have to travel to larger cities to attend gigs or festivals. The music scene within Stoke-on-Trent is particularly close-knit, so Your City Festival not only aims to highlight musicians to fans within the city, but also to provide a platform to promote Stoke’s musicians to industry professionals from other parts of the country.
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Alongside music, Your City also hosts industry-level events like UnConvention Stoke.
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I joined Your City Festival in 2019 as a member of general staff. Before 2019's event, the festival had no festival-exclusive staff besides the small core team - meaning that on the weekend, the operation of the festival was largely left to venue staff.
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As a musician who has played the festival before, I knew the event coordinator Ben Nixon, and so when the organisation of a volunteer event team was proposed, I was trusted to organise it, and to act as a team leader over the course of the festival, overseeing the roles Ben had assigned and assisting wherever I was needed. This included acting as artist liaison (making sure artists were where they needed to be and running on time), selling and distributing wristbands and artist passes, passing communications between the venues and staff, making sure all of the volunteers were comfortable in their roles, and assisting the sound technicians and security in some of the smaller venues where extra help was needed.
The addition of volunteers to the 2019 festival ensured that the festival ran significantly more smoothly, and took some of the pressure off of the venue staff. It also improved communication between everyone involved in the festival, as volunteers were able to move more freely between venues than venue-specific staff could. Due to my role in coordinating this, I was offered a role as Volunteer Coordinator within the festival’s core team for future events, and have been entrusted with finding volunteers for the next festival, providing them with training, organising the scheduling and managing the team for the event.
Kezia’s help throughout the duration of the weekend proved to be not only invaluable to the delivery of tasks and responsibilities, Kez proved to be a vital member of my voluntary team, so much that I have now appointed Kez to run the volunteer programme as a core member of my team, in which I have given her free reign to create and run the programme as I trust that she will ensure that the tasks at hand are completed to their full capacity.
- Ben Nixon, Your City Festival Event Coordinator