MANAGING AN EVENT, RAISING THE BAR: What gives us pleasure at the end of a decent day with more than 1000 people, primarily farmers, turning up?
1. Zero waste event - not a single plastic or non decomposable material was used by the organizers for the entire event. The only waste that left the venue was the decomposable plates and they went into the SLI compost in our office. All the banners were cloth and hand painted (with words careful to make them reusable), all signage hand made. The festoons were traditional and made with natural decomposable material as well. All the 4 venues used steel tumblers and no disposable cups anywhere. Water was served to all speakers in the same, and, no one objected to it.
2. Low disturbance to neighbours - when at the end of such a busy day, the next door neighbor compliments you that the movement of people was well regulated and there was no disturbance to them, then you know that it was an event with least disturbance
3. Ease of movement for visitors - the farmer who has come last year, says, 'the signage, placement of water spots, the garbage bins were all very appropriate', then we know that everyone who visited seemed to feel very comfortable. It also explained to us why no one left!
4. Least noise or commotion - it is often felt that big events need necessarily to be accompanied by big noise. Except for the speakers that carried the speeches to the farmers, there was no big noise at the venue. No blasting music nor loud speeches, gentle speeches by experts, much appreciated peppered with much humour thanks to Maaji Atmavikasa Priya Amba, Prof. Sultan Ismail, Ananthoo, Paamayan, Selvam, Britto, Bernard,Krishna and Seva Vivekanandan.
5. Stall, sales and no complaints - there were about 30 stalls, many of them were selling their produced or traditional seeds, they all uniformly reported very good sales at the end of the day. In fact 2 of the stalls shut down in couple of hours completely sold out!.
Yes idea of the
@seed festival is in itself great and the content as ideas and seeds were an inspiration, but, the greatness of content is not our making, it would be great everywhere, that which we at SLI are proud of are the small details of organising. Thank you everyone who helped us make it possible.
