As we drive to Baldersby for this year’s Deer Shed Festival, the group chat is a flurry of excited messages between people who have and haven’t met. Selfies of people in packed cars, ETAs, last-minute updates and requests.
Wrist bands on we drive to our marquee behind where we will all pitch our tents for the coming four days. We stretch nylon walls between poles, spaces that we will call home. Gazebos are erected to house our communal kitchen and we start laying the foundations of a community. A huge circle of chairs spreads out, the centre of which will become a late-night stage for drumming, dancing, and games. There will be a constant flurry of eggs frying, chai brewing, and rice cooking. Food is love and together we will all share in this language. Friendship and connection will foster as our bellies fill.
Our marquee is decorated with photography, crafts, quizzes, information, and passion. We are ready and waiting, eager to reach out and share with people our stories, performances, workshops, enthusiasm, and more. We braid bracelets, play with clay, write poetry, and share the history of Holbeck Moor Football Club. By the end of the festival, we have filled three banners with the footprints and handprints of those passers-by who paused to stop and support our cause. The prints symbolising the journey to seek sanctuary that so many have taken.
There were thirty-four of us in total, including five children. You might think that sounds sprawling, but it only ever felt tight nit. We came together so seamlessly. United under our shared belief in sanctuary for all.
Out of the thirty-four volunteers in attendance, two-thirds of us were people seeking sanctuary. We were a group led by people with lived experience.
Over the coming days of the festival, we held court in the Book End Tent where Jesamine, Dianna, Akhona, and others put on stunning performances incorporating dance and music. People shared their stories, performed spoken word art, and spread awareness about the reality of living in Britain as a sanctuary seeker. The messages were harrowing, but many of them also contained joy and hope. Offering a perspective on the festival that no one else could have shared, Mohsen said to his audience: “You don’t understand, a festival like this with huge crowds of people, just being together being happy, without any fights, this could never happen in my country.”
Being able to attend the Deer Shed Festival didn’t just provide us with an opportunity to spread awareness though, it provided us with an opportunity to solidify our base, to build connections with existing and new members, to reach out and into the community and build our network.
The work of solidarity and sanctuary is rarely – sadly – done by politicians or people in high-paying roles, but the everyday people who walk our streets. We are not high-profile figures, we are students, public sector employees, support workers, university administrative staff, shop owners, dust bin collectors, volunteers… We are you.
The symbol of City of Sanctuary is two bodies holding hands to create an arc that outlines the shape of a home. At events, we often ask people to hold hands in a circle to recreate these arcs between each other’s bodies. Together at Deer Shed we made this circle wider. We created more arcs.
I think the general picture of charity groups like the City of the Sanctuary is that they seek to provide us with what we need. Yes, this is a big part of what they do for us, and we are very grateful to them for that. But I believe they are more than that. They create a good bond between us. They are a bridge of communication between the refugees who isolated themselves due to traumas and different reasons and are far away from the society that welcomes them in any way.
Mohsen, City of Sanctuary, Volunteer
At the beginning of the festival, our marquee occupied a neat little pitch sandwiched between our two neighbours, but by the Sunday, we had sprawled outwards, our energy kinetic and tangible. Jesamine’s drumming workshops and performances now featured a parade. We moved out into the space of the festival and pulled people back to our tent. We became a hub of creativity and lively exchange. We danced and others danced with us. We sang and others sang with us.
Midday on Friday, one of our volunteers, Fathelrahman, had an interview with the University of Bradford for a scholarship. He connected to the festival WiFi, and sat in Blue’s campervan behind our marquee. Later that day when he spoke on stage, Fathelrahman talked about the journey he had been on, and how he now waited to find out if he would be accepted for this placement or not. By the evening, his confirmation letter had come through.
The Deer Shed festival gave us the opportunity to celebrate the incredible lives, cultures, and contributions our amazing collective has to offer. Wan, our volunteer Content Creator and Social Media Manager (who also happens to voluntarily manage the Leeds Sanctuary’s Got Talent group) would admonish me if I did not take this opportunity to also mention that not only is all of this work done voluntarily, but it is done so because people seeking asylum do not have a right to work in this country. As part of our work as a City of Sanctuary collective, we are campaigning to Lift the Ban.
Doing this work requires a huge amount of resources, time, and effort. Yes, the Deer Shed Festival provided a beautiful opportunity to spread awareness, share our passions, music, dance, food, and stories. But it also provided us with an intensely important opportunity to continue solidifying and expanding our base, the base that will continue doing this work, the base without whom which this work, this collective, would not exist.
With thanks to the Deer Shed for providing us with the free tickets, and to the Yorkshire Dales Millennium Trust for providing us with the funding that made this possible.
Written by Hope Bachmann.
Postgraduate Researcher | Funded by WROCAH (AHRC)
Leeds City of Sanctuary | Treasurer
Roots & Rhymes | Creative Writing Workshop Facilitator