The process of setting up Welfare in 2021

What is Welfare?

Welfare has a crucial role at Kiezburn. It is a place open to visit for the entire Kiezburn community. Festivals in general and use of substances can result in overwhelming and uncomfortable experiences.  Welfare at Kiezburn is a space for people to retreat to if they want to quiet & calm down, return to feeling safe psychologically & physically, and reinstate a feeling of belonging.  We think that we can make Kiezburn a safer place by creating a culture of compassion and support. If we can get people to take care of each other, a lot of harm can be prevented, and we rise together as a community.

Volunteers are there to provide care and kindness to the visitors,  where  anyone can find support in whatever they are going through.

One can stop there to get a cup of tea, a chat, ears to listen, a sitter, nurse, plaster, band-aid, a hug or support to find more professional help.

There are two kinds of Welfare Volunteers:

1. Care Bears are Welfare volunteers that went through A Care Bear School or have Welfare relevant experience and provide compassionate care and support for people who are having challenging experiences: psychological or emotional. There are 3 kinds of Care Bears:

   1. Domestic Care Bears

      These Care Bears live in the Republic of Care aka Welfare and help out in the Hall of Hearts ( the Main Tent) and Care-a-Lot (Specialized Care Tents). Their focus is on caring and helping and bringing love. If someone comes to Welfare needing more attention, they can be assigned to Care-a-Lot, which is a separate tent where we take care of people going through psychological difficulties. A Care Bear will support them there.

   2. Wild Walking Care Bears

      Because this year is special for all of us, we will have teams of Care Bears and Teddies walking around Kiezburn to elevate the collective emotional level. They are there to bring care, harm reduction supplies and to make your time as enjoyable and lovely as possible. So if you need a little love, a hug, or any other magic, they are here to make this burn even greater and more loving. These wandering Care Bears can be recognized by their super comfy fur, the Kiezburn Welfare sign on their bellies, their special Welfare badge and a pole with a care bear attached to the top.

   3. Harmony Supervising Bear

      This care bear is on duty for the Republic of Caring aka Welfare for 12 hours to ensure continuity. The harmony bear stays reasonably close to Welfare and carries a radio so that they can be reachable at all times. These are highly trained professionals who are either doctors or have other high qualifications and know how to handle any emergency situation.

2. Teddies Teddies are apprentices and companions of the Care Bears and are there to assist in whatever is needed: serving tea, making people feel welcome or any other support in the Hall of Hearts. No experience with psychological care is needed to be a Teddy but they need to feel comfortable with taking care of people in distress and are good listeners.

What do you have to do here?

• recruiting and managing Welfare team

• finding and communicating with volunteers

• setting up and coordinating harm reduction and harm - support trainings and to make it really great authentic relating and other relating modality trainings

• managing inventory, purchasing and delivering needed items

• setting up or managing setting up a Welfare space on site

• cleaning of previous year: blanket, sheets and other washable materials

• leading and moulding the team into a coherent whole, facilitating state of trust, reliance and loyalty between team members

• establishing a working schedule at Kiezburn with back up plans and people

• cooperation with First Aid and other complementary services

• Code of Conduct and Safety protocol training

Budget

• in 2021 we are having 1500 Euro budget and are we are not renting a yurt as we did in previous year. We are going to be working with a 5x5 tent and getting extra tents to make it nicely set up

• I put up a dream in order to be allowed for Built and we are going to have some additional funding from that

Welfare Love-A-Lot Team

@River Aleks - Welfare Lead

@Valentin_Seehausen - Budget, Safety, Inventory, Build

@Rachel - Volunteer Coordination

@Lindsey E Shit Plan Magician

@Joice Biazoto - Costumes & Culture

@Ale - Orga Wizard

@Alex - Welfare Dream & Build

@Marina - Graphic Design, Deco & Orga Wizard

@Nicki Trainings & Harm Reduction Team

@Inna - Training Coordination, Community & Inventory

@Juliane Mueller Culture and Bear Graduation Ceremony

@Sarah Montgomery Project Manager and Deadline Dominatrix

Help?

• last year' Welfare leads ( Kai and Steffen)

• org questions? board 

• finance? @Professor Kaos

• other peeps: see realities + Add your name here too!

Other Welfare Team Duties

• Volunteer coordination

• Get stuff back into storage and make an inventory

• Clear out with finance all invoices etc

More details can be found in google drive over here: https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/my-drive

 WELFARE IN DETAILS

• Preparing a shift plan and passing it on to the Volunteer Lead

  • we used a shift plan both for Care Bears and Teddies from previous years, we have expanded the plan for some additional mobile shift at the most demanding times of Kiezburn

  • it was extremely easy this year to find volunteers this year, the intake form was posted once on Kiezburn Channel and once on Facebook Kiezburn group and generated 80 sign ups.

  • it was tricky to communicate the training dates as it was still unclear who, how and what will be the trainings, it would have been way easier if we knew it well in advance.

  • the shift plan is closed until we are through with first harm reduction training because we want to make sure that there is at least one trained person per shift.

• Finding a training partner

  • as I do not have enough experience in harm reduction I was not feeling so confident in this area but it could have been easily sourced from the community, there was a lot of people with great experience who filled out our intake form

  • we opted out to find help with Chillout-Potsdam or Eclipse. Eclipse is way to busy and probably should have been contacted 2 - 3 months ago. Chillout-Potsdam were slow to reply, I called them 3 times and they were extremely nice on the phone and eager to help but it took them over 2 weeks to get their act together and to proposed a date, which was tricky in this year as we are doing everything so late. But I have announced the date already and have asked people to fill out this questionnaire to find out how many people can make it.

  • the Chillout contact person is Manuela Schulz (m.schulz@chillout-pdm.de ) who worked with us in 2017 and had a great experience and wants to do it again with us but she asked for a honorary, which we will pay, it is unclear yet how much.

  • I asked for a help of a friend Nathan who had been bringing Authentic Relating and other relating modalities to Berlin to give us a training on that and offered him a small honorary ( 35 Euros)

• Setting up a team

  • the process so far has been very organic. I found at least 2 members who are very passionate for the project and it has been easy and joyful to work together

  • I would be a tiny bit more confident to have some person with medical/harm reduction experience with us but it is and would have been easy to source it externally.

• Creating a Care Bear and Teddy concept

  • it is the first year that we have called the Welfare Volunteers Care Bears and Teddies

  • it seems to have contributed greatly to the the upsurge in volunteers

  • @Boaz Balachsan has offered to create a logo for us, it is looking great but we are still working on a final version

  • we would like to create a teddy and care bear look, this is still in progress and we will look for suggestions

  • we will offer badges and pins for the volunteers with the logo

  • we also are working on creating and spreading of a culture of compassion and support

• Making sure that Welfare is Visible

  • we had reports from last years that Welfare was hard to find and that people did not know it existed

  • I talked to the gate lead to make sure that greeting incorporates some sort of indication of welfare and first aid

  • we will make sure to make many signs and a glowing sign for the night time

• Making sure that Welfare is in a quiet zone

  • in the 2 previous Kiezburn editions Welfare was next to Underworld

  • this year it was a priority to move it to a more quiet location

Notes from Welfare Meetings

• 1st meeting from the 29.06.2021 notes

• 2nd meeting from the 08.07.2021 notes and role distribution notes

• 3rd meeting from the 19.07.2021 notes which are also housed on the Master Google Doc

• 4th meeting from 26.07.2021 notes

• 5th meeting from 02.08.2021notes