Herts charity's festival sweeps set to provide thousands of items to those in need
For their ninth festival season, Herts for Refugees have started introducing on-site donation points
A Hertfordshire-based refugee charity has spent nearly a decade collecting abandoned tents and camping equipment from music festivals to redistribute to people in need.
The charity Herts for Refugees was established in 2015, originally as a small collection in a flat in Watford.
It quickly grew, with generous donations from the people of Hertfordshire, allowing volunteers to convoy items to the Calais Jungle, a refugee and immigrant encampment in the vicinity of Calais in France.
Within its first year of existence, the charity gained access to a festival after it had concluded to collaborate with those on sites picking up discarded items from festival goers, which has since grown to a four-plus festival season.
Angus Clark, Chief Executive Officer of Herts for Refugees, who started the charity a decade ago, explained the scale and evolution of the charity and said: "We started as a Facebook group in 2015 and became an official charity in 2016, so coming up for our 10-year anniversary this."
Since its founding, Herts for Refugees has increasingly focused on collecting salvageable camping gear.
In 2023, the organisation collected an estimated 6,000 to 7,000 tents and around 8,000 to 9,000 items in total, including sleeping bags.
Angus said: "It’s certainly become the largest project that we do throughout the year. It’s the main thing that we do now.
"Last year we delivered the full 40-foot articulated lorry and three 7 1/2 tonne trucks full of tents and sleeping bags to our partner organisations
"They actually now rely on us for a lot of their winter stock."
The team works from early June through to the end of August, covering festivals from the Isle of Wight to Reading and Leeds. "It’s always a rush at the start of the year because the Isle of Wight and Glastonbury are only one week apart," he explained. "It gets us fit for the rest of it."
The work is supported by a growing volunteer base. Reading Festival, for example, has a good base with up to 130 volunteers that come every year.
Some also join through corporate volunteering schemes, where employers allow staff to take a day off to support a charitable cause.
At each festival, Herts for Refugees collaborates with partnering charities, which can vary from one event to the next. One long-running partnership is with the homelessness charity Emmaus' Hertfordshire branch.
Angus said: "It’s the fourth year that we’ve had Emmaus working with us, which is absolutely fantastic.
"They work with us to collect tents, sleeping bags and all the things that we need for refugees who of course, are also homeless people. And it’s just a lovely integration of the two charities - they absolutely get it."
This year’s Isle of Wight Festival was the first to include integrated donation points and “Green Team” volunteers throughout the event — part of a wider push to change festivalgoer attitudes toward waste.
"The overarching message is to please take your stuff home with you," Angus said. "Yes, we benefit from it, but really it’s not sustainable."
The charity is keen to combat the misconception that it’s acceptable to leave tents behind because charities will pick them up.
Instead, they are increasingly trying to change mentalities and ensure campers have the option to leave items behind, but in good condition and at designated points.
"At the bigger festivals it will take something between two weeks and a month to get the site back to its pre-festival condition ... which of course is no good for the environment and it actually adds quite a significant amount to the price of the ticket."
In the meantime, the team are returning from Glastonbury, after a sweep of the isle of Wight Festival last week, which already saw dozens of items collected in one vanload alone.
From there, the team will be adding items, ready for a big trip to Calais after the summer, helping refugees across the channel.