And that’s a wrap; 90 speakers, 21 hours of live-stream juicy content, 20 workshops, 63 conscious brands, over one thousand attendees, and hundreds of #LittleGreenSteps. Here are the highlights from our first-ever Virtual Conscious Festival.
In case you’ve been living under a rock, we’ve been running Conscious Festival’s in Singapore for five years, and Hong Kong for three. We were also due to launch the festival in London this summer for the first time ever. And then COVID-19 happened and, well, you know the rest of the story. If you’d have told us three months ago that we’d have to pivot so drastically and transform our entire festival into a virtual experience we never would have believed it to be possible. Yet here we are and what a ride it’s been.
We can’t believe how much we managed to cram into three days (ambitious, much!). But before we share the highlights, we wanted to extend one last huge thank you to our incredible partners without whom this event would not have been possible. MASH Brands, The Mills Fabrica, Sino Hotels, City Developments Limited, New World Development, and Carbon Care Asia; thank you. Finally, we also need to thank our incredible hosts at The Hive who created a safe space that enabled us to film in the middle of a global pandemic.
If you missed it, fret not; here’s a round-up of some of the best bits. We hope you enjoyed it as much as we did!
The Talks
Over 90 speakers joined us from locations around the world to share some incredible insights, experiences and knowledge. We covered a lot of ground and tackled challenging conversations spanning race, colonialism, racism & the environment, regeneration, the future of cities, money and its relation with sustainability, psychedelics, capitalism v the climate and more. If you weren’t able to attend and want to view the talks; watch this space. We’ll shortly be sharing all content online.
The food
It may have been a virtual event but our food partnerships in Singapore, Hong Kong, Paris and London allowed attendees to enjoy delicious plant-based food, zero-waste style. Our team in Singapore took full advantage of the barePack x foodpanda collab and enjoyed eats throughout the weekend in barePack’s brilliant zero-waste, reusable containers. If you’d like to see more zero-waste food delivery options, please keep supporting this collaboration. And hopefully, soon we’ll be saying sayonara to single-use disposables for takeout for good.
The ecstatic dance
We danced into the cosmos during an incredible ecstatic dance session at the Stage 6 We Dance party. What a blast it was seeing everyone let loose on screen and enjoy the moment. No booze, no shoes, just pure joy and dance; we loved sharing the energy with you all! If you want to do it all again, check out the Stage 6 website; they regularly host We Dance parties which anyone can join. We recommend.
The workshops
Attendees who were able to drag themselves away from the TALKS main stage were spoilt with an eclectic mix of brilliant workshops. From learning how to make your money sustainable and digital marketing insights & strategies for businesses to navigate through the ‘new normal’, to yoga and personal coaching; we had it all. A selection of these incredible workshops will also shortly be available online. We’ll be sharing more details soon.
The global audience
One of the most incredible things about a virtual event is seeing people tuning in from all corners of the globe. We wanted this event to feel truly global, and with attendees (and speakers) joining from around the world our audience has never been more diverse. Huzzah to that.
Speakers dialling in from weird places
With this being our first-ever virtual event we were bracing ourselves for the inevitable technical glitches (of which there were thankfully few!). But what we hadn’t bargained for was some of our speakers having to participate from weird and wonderful places. We must give an extra special thanks to the brilliant Libby Davy who dialled in from the back of a taxi after getting unexpectedly held up at a Black Lives Matter protest she was attending. But as they say, “the show must go on” and Libby did not disappoint! We’ll be sharing her talk and coaching workshop soon.
Our most diverse panel yet
And talking of Black Lives Matter, this year we’ve been working on curating a more diverse speaker line-up: 30% of our speakers at the Virtual Conscious Festival were non-white. But we recognise this still isn’t good enough and we have more work to do. We’ll be sharing our goals and the steps we’re taking to increase the amount of non-white voices at our events in our post-event sustainability report. Watch this space.
Our lowest impact festival
We always try to practice what we preach by ensuring that our events leave as little impact as possible. And by going virtual, we were able to significantly reduce our carbon footprint. Our partner, Carbon Care Asia, is also helping us track our impact and we’ll be planting trees to offset our footprint. We’ll be sharing more about this in our soon to be released sustainability report.
Our brilliant conscious brands
Over 60 vendors set up shop at our conscious marketplace for the duration of the festival. If you’re quick, you might still be able to take advantage of a special GITNB discount. Check out the marketplace on our website to shop.
And finally, we shared some BIG news!
The cat’s out the bag; we’re taking the Conscious Festival to Paris in 2021! We’ve learnt a lot from this virtual festival and our goal is to merge the digital and IRL experience. Fingers crossed we’ll FINALLY be able to make our way to Europe next year (COVID, be gone!).