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CITY LIFE
Intrinsic to life
Bristol’s live music venue, Exchange, has recently launched a new befriending service, aiming to make the city’s rich calendar of events accessible to everyone. Here, manager Iwan Best sits down to talk the arts: intrinsic to life and liberty
Exchange manager, Iwan Best
they are combatting loneliness as we enter the third year of the pandemic, and how useful it can be having big-name talent tweet about a local fundraiser.
Gig Buddies Bristol
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befriending project like no other, Gig Buddies is a driving force for change, tackling loneliness and social isolation while simultaneously reinforcing the message that the arts are an instinctive essential of our humanity – and access to them is a birthright not a luxury. The brain child of Paul Richards – founder of Brighton-based charity Stay Up Late – Gig Buddies has been enabling people from across the country with learning disabilities and/or autism to have people in their lives who aren’t just paid to be there. Paul was finding that many people were not able to lead full and active social lives due to their support workers finishing at 10pm, meaning they were often having to leave gigs early. He wanted to ensure that person-centred planning truly reflected what an individual wanted to do in their life. Since 2013, Gig Buddies has been matching people with volunteers who share similar interests in music, helping them form meaningful relationships, build confidence and lead a life powered by their own passions. Bristol is now the 12th UK city to take on the project, launching at the community-owned live music venue, Exchange. As the only grassroots venue in the south of England with a Silver Award on Attitude Is Everything’s Grassroots Charter – a service that improves deaf and disabled people’s access to live music – Exchange could not be a better place for the project to grow. With Bristol local and IDLES bassist, Adam ‘Dev’ Devonshire, also heavily involved as patron, we were eager to discover how the team were planning to help people in the city. This month, Exchange’s manager, Iwan Best, sat down with us to explain how they are trying to make Bristol’s supremely diverse arts and culture scene accessible to everyone, how 34 THE BRISTOL MAGAZINE
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FEBRUARY 2022
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NO¯ 207
Bristol is home to an abundance of celebrated art galleries, internationally renowned theatres and buzzing music venues as well as victorious sports teams and award-winning comedy clubs. With such a rich calendar of events on offer, the Bristol project will connect people who not only have similar interests in music but also have a love for theatre, a passion for sport and an appreciation for art. “Being in Bristol, there’s such a broad range of events, we wanted to open it up,” Iwan tells us. “We’ve had a few people that just want to go and watch a game with someone and it seemed quite counter to what the project is about to say no, so we’ve already got a few people paired up to go and watch the Bristol Bears and the football.” Volunteers are matched to one Gig Buddy with whom they will attend events in and around Bristol. Volunteers are expected to commit to at least one event per month with their Gig Buddy, and to meet once a month for a coffee to plan their event. Once volunteers have applied, they will be set up on the DBS system before attending an interview. Successful applicants will then be invited to a training day where, as Iwan perfectly sums it up, they will learn how to be a good friend. “It’s a day’s training because it’s really important that the volunteers aren’t there to offer primary care – it’s a befriending project for vulnerable adults, they’re not there to offer medical help but nonetheless the training has a lot of information about safeguarding, emergency procedures, and how to look out for the tell-tale signs that there might be a problem,” he says. “There’s also a lot about managing expectations because we find that people are keen to go out every week once they’ve got someone to go with. It should be fun – the whole point is that you’re going to the events that you would go to anyway and you make a new friend. The training also helps people to understand what it might be like to be neurodivergent or autistic, and thinking: alright this person might love metal but they might not love AC/DC or Guns N’ Roses because they haven’t had a social circle that has given them the opportunity to find out more. What could be a good thing to do is make a Spotify playlist with all the metal bands that are coming through Bristol in the next few months so they can find some new things.”
Bristol Gig Buddies Callum McLellan (left) and Brian Wilcox (right) enjoying their first gig together at The Fleece
