Executive Director Gareth Higgins Describes the Wild Goose Festival – Part 1

As Wild Goose 2012 approaches, this blog will attempt to capture the festival from the viewpoints of those who participate in it. From today’s comments by Executive Director Gareth Higgins to highlights shared by volunteer leaders, performers, attenders and friends, you’ll see how the Goose connects with a variety of people in a variety of ways.

**If you’d like to share your experience with Wild Goose, please email sarah (at) wildgoosefestival (dot) org.**

Interview With Gareth Higgins, Executive Director of the Wild Goose Festival – Part 1

Q: Gareth, many people have heard about the Wild Goose Festival, but can you tell us some of the back story that not everyone might know? How was the idea for the Wild Goose festival conceived?

A: We took inspiration from the Greenbelt Festival in the UK, a gathering where art, justice, and faith collide. Many people from the US have returned from Greenbelt wanting to see a festival like this emerge here. Greenbelt has served as a source of inspiration to our team in many ways. It manages to embody creativity and social action, launching some important initiatives like the One Campaign in Europe and the Jubilee 2000 campaign to end Third World debt. We also love how Greenbelt brings people together from different streams of the Christian tradition and allows people who don’t identify as Christian to be in relationship across lines of difference.

It could be said that US Christianity may have more economic resources than any other religious community in the history of the world; but those resources haven’t always been put to good use. Many people perceive and experience US American Christianity to be divisive, prejudiced, sometimes even violent, and often full of guilt, rather than being a life-giving source for the common good. So we wanted to nurture a gathering that could be rooted in the Christian tradition while also critiquing its shadow side: learning and embodying the lessons of justice, welcome, creativity, and grass roots community, while acknowledging the broken parts of our own tradition, ensuring that marginalized voices are heard, and committing to radical love as both our goal and the path we use to get there.

Q: As the Executive Director, what is your long-term vision/hope for the festival, Gareth? What do you want it to accomplish?

A: I’m honored to be part of a team of people who want to have an artistic, creative gathering at the intersection of justice, spirituality and art that creates transformation for the common good.

I don’t refer to our work as “changing the world” – that has become a cliche, and it’s not necessarily good change that happens as a result of influential social movements. And sometimes I’m not sure if it’s the world that needs to change or if its us that needs to be changed.  That’s why we talk about promoting the common good.

At last year’s festival, the civil rights elder statesman Dr. Vincent Harding said that in some senses he wishes the movement hadn’t been called the ‘civil rights movement’, because it was really a larger movement of transformation that could affect far more than just minority groups and public policy on questions of prejudice around race and ethnicity. Its larger hope was the transformation of the whole community into a place where love, respect, interdependence, and peace are characteristic of everyday life for us all.

So Wild Goose is about transformation. We want to prompt holistic change in how we relate to each other as human beings, how we care for the earth, and ultimately, the power each of us to promote an end to violence, and the things that make for peace. We want to do this in partnership with each other, with immense creativity, and in a space where people don’t have to know all the answers before they speak.