New Westminster wants all city festivals to follow the lead of New West Pride.
As part of last year’s New West Pride Festival, the society sought to be more inclusive to people who have mobility issues, are deaf or hard of hearing, are blind or have limited vision, are gender non-conforming or lack financial resources. In December 2016, the society urged city council to include accessibility information in their promotions and to plan for inclusion at all festivals, and offered to make its 52-point accessibility audit checklists available to the city and businesses and groups planning events at local venues.
On Monday, council approved a recommendation that the city encourage all public events to include accessibility information in their promotion and to plan for inclusion.
“This came from work that the New West Pride Society did to provide audits and measure the accessibility of all the sites that they had their events at last year, including a street fest,” said Coun. Patrick Johnstone, chair of the city’s access advisory committee. “This came to access advisory committee and they recommended that we basically encourage all festivals in the city to adopt a similar standard of reporting information about how they are going to make their event sites accessible.”
While it’s great to encourage festival organizers to make their events more accessible, Johnstone said he’d like to go a step further and develop a city policy that includes accessibility as part of the criteria for evaluating festivals and grant applications in the city. Council referred the matter to the city’s festivals committee with the goal of bringing recommendations back to council.
“I think that’s a good point,” said Mayor Jonathan Cote. “Even if through our application process that could somehow be highlighted so groups have an opportunity to demonstrate how they are dealing with these issues.”
Some of the accessibility features that New West Pride incorporated into last year’s street party included having American Sign Language on both stages, two accessible bathrooms, wheelchair and priority seating by the main stage, a shade tent, gender-neutral bathroom signage for private venues and a details map identifying accessibility features. The cost of the accessibility features was $1,800, or 5.2 per cent of the festival’s budget.
