Charity in Oxford has always existed on a much smaller scale than elsewhere. It’s a world of high-rise fundraisers, themed club nights, and summer balls. Breaking into this world is just one option on the Oxford extra-curricular platter. Lucy Hartley decided to go one step further, with her Otra Vida festival.
Hartley and her boyfriend, Janek Seevaratnam set up the charity Yanapay Europe together as the European branch of Peruvian charity Aldea Yanapay. The charity is run by Yuri, a young hippie with a mature dream. They want to create a series of self-sustaining, eco-friendly projects, providing education and homes for impoverished Peruvian children. Each of the projects-so far two schools and a cultural centre-is funded by an attached business venture. They have a hostel, which also helps them attract more student volunteers, and a restaurant.
Yuri believe that everyone can, and should, do something to help promote social change. He wants to take these efforts, and channel them into a self-supporting project. The long term dream is to set up an orphanage, a mammoth task requiring over £20,000 in donations. This was just a dream; until Hartley steped in. Now, they’re trying to raise the funds by throwing a full-scale festival in the middle of Oxford.
The conception of Otra Vida seems remarkably haphazard. Seevaratnam became involved with the charity Aldea Yanapay whilst travelling in Peru. He kept in touch with Yuri when he began his degree, and continued to do his bit for charity by selling spray-painted t-shirts and sending the proceeds to Africa.
Unimpressed with Seevaratnam’s t-shirt venture, Yuri declared that he needed to do more: ‘He said ‘I want you and your girlfriend to come and help me and my girlfriend. Together we’re going to make this orphanage’. After a ‘bit of a chat’ Hartley and Seevaratnam were decided; together they would build an orphanage.
With plans to move to Peru after Oxford to get the project off the ground, the pair have committed themselves for the long-haul. But, rather than waiting until then to raise the twenty-thousand pounds needed to set up the orphanage, the couple started putting on open-mic nights to start to chip away at their target. Then came a brainwave; why not try to make the whole lot in one epic event? And Otra Vida was born.
On the day I’m supposed to meet her, Lucy is running late, dashing from an appointment with the bank manager who’s behind schedule and has, once again, messed up. Tickets are going on sale the next day and the project desperately needs the bank to sort itself out so that they have somewhere to deposit the cash from ticket sales.
She admits that organising the festival has become a full-time job. Endless meetings with the council, the security company, the events management, local residents fill her days. What keeps the project going is the endless drive and enthusiasm on the part of Hartley, and the small team helping her to pull the project off. It’s an epic task for four people to accomplish on their own, especially given as they all have full-time degrees and Seevaratnam is in Paris on his year abroad.
Their faith in the project comes apparent when we start talking about the figures. The scale of the project is beyond all other student charitable ventures I’ve come across. With tickets at only ten quid each, they want to sell four thousand in total. Tickets were supposed to go on sale some time ago, but hold-ups at the council over the use of South Parks have delayed it. They now have only one month to get their marketing campaign into gear and shift tickets.
I asked whether Hartley is confident that the festival would recoup the twenty-five odd thousand pounds it will cost to pull off. Without hesitation or deviation, the answer is ‘yes’. Given the challenges of selling four thousand tickets in one month, for an event that’s going to be held in the middle of finals, it’s easy to be sceptical. But her confidence is what makes the project so inspiring. She has such faith in its success that you can’t help but begin to believe it will work.
The project is driven the partnership between Hartley and Seevaratnam. Their faith in each other and commitment to the project as a couple seems to have given them the confidence to jump in the deep end. Across the channel in Paris and unable to get involved in the day to day organisation, Seevaratnam has handed the reins over to Lucy. His pride and admiration in the hard work that Lucy has put in is clear. ‘She’s better than Bob Geldof’ he tells me. It’s clear that they work really well as a team; he’s the laid-back free-spirit with dreadlocks with a big vision for the project and she’s got the knack for organisation and the eye for detail which will make the festival work.
The three music stages will play host to fresh new bands from around the UK; hopefully launching their careers will be Gentleman’s Dub Club, Foreign Beggars and The Molotovs, to name a few. A chill-out woodland acoustic area will set up in the trees, and the area will be scattered with performers, poetry and spoken word, food, fun and (fingers crossed) sunshine, all with a Latin theme. Combined with an afterparty featuring a DJ set by Foals and some of Oxford’s best DJs, the event has something for everyone.
Hartley is keen to impress that it isn’t just an event for Oxford University students. Uneasy about the extent to which the university is integrated into the wider Oxford community, she sees the event as an opportunity to promote social cohesion. Working closely with Oxford Community Centre, local schools and charities, it’s an event for everyone, not just students.
Profits from the sale of the festival programmes are going to the local children’s charity Helen and Douglas House, who will be involved in the day’s frivolities, performing and taking part in the workshops run in the kids’ zone. The kids’ zone will even make the festival family friendly. Handily, a friend of a friend knows a man with an ambition to set up a circus school, so he’s been roped in to run workshops for children.
Having seen what the charity is about and Hartley’s motivation behind it, a festival is the perfect choice; it’s the extension of their attitude to life. They want to create an event that is inclusive for everybody, with a fantastic atmosphere and a really good cause behind it. Rather than seeing it as an ‘event’, the couple see it as ‘having some friends round to listen to some really good music’… on a massive scale.
The enthusiasm and vision has convinced me. I only hope that others (four thousand of them) will be similarly swept away by the idea of Otra Vida and what it represents.
Viva L’Otra Vida
