Why being ethical, promoting diversity and continuing to learn and change, matters to us.
We’re a small independent company and we believe that it’s important, now more than ever, to shout about the ethical things that we do as an organisation and how we are planning to learn, change and keep evolving as a business. We have detailed below how we are working to better our events and systems but please feel free to get in touch with us if you think there are other things we could and should be doing. Employees We are proud of our women-led team. We provide opportunity and development for each of our full-time employees, as well as benefits including private health care. We employ casual staff and freelancers to help us deliver our events and, through this, we also try to provide event experience for those wanting to pursue a career in the events industry. For example, we offer work experience opportunities and placements to students at The University of Sheffield and Sheffield Hallam University (as well as further afield) and we are always happy to discuss and try to create suitable work placements for those wanting to break into the industry. Our suppliers and collaborators We work with multiple collaborators to deliver our events and therefore choose stakeholders who share our ambitions to create more sustainable events. We also aim to work with as many local and independent businesses as possible, both to boost the local economy and to reduce our carbon footprint. We ask food vendors to comply with our ethical policies, which include disposing of food waste responsibly (perhaps donating left over food where feasible), reducing single-use waste and using packaging and crockery that can be recycled easily. To cater for our wide range of customer needs, we ensure that we offer vegan and gluten-free food options at every event we do. We run the bars at most of our events and we aim to support local breweries and drink suppliers in this way. It is also important to us that the ambitions and behaviours of the venues that we work with align with ours. We work carefully to select venues that give our customers a real wow factor but we also favour working with venues that have a charitable or cultural purpose. For example, both Victoria Baths and Abbeydale Picture House raise funds through their events in order to restore their buildings. When hosting events at these venues, we try to offer a donation option at the point of sale. Waste Management We take our environmental responsibilities seriously and, as such, we have minimised the use of single-use plastics and materials at all our events. Our bar disposables are now supplied by Vegware; made from plants using renewable, lower carbon, recycled or reclaimed materials, and where possible we can compost these with our food waste. To minimise the use of disposable cups, we are starting to introduce discounts and incentives to encourage customers to bring their own reusable cups to our events. We also try to offer free tap water to our customers (where feasible) to reduce the sale of bottled water. We are working with waste management companies that share our values. All our event waste is sorted using labelled bins and recycled responsibly by our waste management contractor. We are mindful of the amount of paper we use as a company. We limit printing in our office and onsite by using collaboration software and shared drives. We now encourage our attendees to present their tickets digitally upon entry into our events rather than printing their tickets. We always reuse where possible. Any stock that we have left over from our events, that would ordinarily be thrown away, we donate to The Cathedral Archer Project in Sheffield. Accessibility We try to make our events as accessible as possible, but sometimes we are unable to make all of our events wheelchair and disability friendly. The Peak Cavern, for example, poses an issue for us. To date, we have been unable to get disabled toilets safely into the event spaces at the Peak Cavern. However, we will be reviewing this going forward and looking at alternative options. We offer complimentary carer tickets at all our seated events. We ask those with any disability, hearing or accessibility issue to get in touch with us ahead of any advertised event to discuss any of their concerns so that we can try to make our events as great as possible for every attendee. Diversity We are an anti-racist organisation. We condemn all forms of racial injustice within our organisation and within the spaces we work within and the wider world. We know there is more we need to do in order to support those from black and ethnic minority backgrounds - we need to do the work to better educate ourselves and to open the doors to create greater diversity both within our workplace and at our events. We will be taking some time to evaluate our current practices, learn, support and put measures in place. We know we need to do the work to get this right. Charitable work We believe in giving back. We set up the annual Ride for Eric event and trust in 2016. Ride for Eric raises funds to promote safer cycling and pays for bereavement services in South Yorkshire. We regularly support The Cathedral Archer Project in Sheffield either through volunteering or donations. We recently did a free event for the Pankhurst Trust in Manchester to help raise funds to support Manchester’s Women’s Aid and the mission of the Pankhurst Centre. We often donate free Village Screen tickets to raise money for charitable causes and we encourage our staff to support charitable causes that are close to their hearts. We are also planning to donate a number of free tickets to key workers when we launch our Drive Thru cinema experience this summer.
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