TLDR: We’re making changes to the leadership structure of Desert Bus to enable us to potentially do new & exciting things in the future. We don’t have anything to announce yet and there are no big changes to the event for 2023. Also some folks are changing hats & Serge is officially retiring. Desert Bus rolls on!

Alright friends, Andrew here. Y’all still with me? Interested in hearing all of The Deets? Great, because I am writing to you as I drift through a sea of neon light halfway around the world and I have a hilarious amount of text to share with you on behalf of the DB Organizing Committee. We’ve been working extra-hard this year and we’re happy to be able to start sharing a glimpse of where we’re at with everyone; Earlier this year, the OC went on a pair of two-day working retreats in order to figure out ‘what’s next?’ for us as an organization. So, let’s dive into that!

The First Summit

Over the course of one weekend in February, all thirteen of us got together in Victoria to start intentionally figuring out what the future of DB could be. Desert Bus itself often operates on a system of ‘same as last year, but better!’, so we wanted to take a longer view and tackle harder questions like ‘what will Desert Bus look like in five years?’ and ‘what else could we do as part of Desert Bus?’. We wanted to give real thought to what we thought could be great for our community, what could be great for Child’s Play, and what could be great for ourselves.

As Desert Bus rapidly approaches the legal voting age, it felt appropriate for each of us to evaluate our own relationship with the event too. We’re all in very different places in our lives from when we originally started (or joined) Desert Bus, and so is our audience! For some of you 2022 was your first ride on the bus, but there are so many of you in our community who have been our friends for nearly two decades now.

We decided to have an enormous greenfield brainstorming session together, thinking of everything we could possibly do; No dream too big, no rule too sacred. Absolutely anything and everything was on the table. As we started to move from idea generation into talking through potential logistics and what folks were excited about, we started to realize that the existing leadership structure for the event was designed for a committee to lead a single recurring project and didn’t adapt well to some of our ideas: How could new projects take shape? How could we better interact with our external partners? How could we make space for more volunteer participation and nurture future leadership?

So, we pivoted towards rethinking our leadership structure and how it could enable new possibilities.

Leadership Structure

In order to build the future we want, here’s what we’ve come up with: What has been traditionally known as ‘The Desert Bus Organizing Committee” has now become the overall Desert Bus For Hope Society Board, who will oversee & advise on all things Desert Bus. In recent years, we established ourselves as a non-profit arts society in British Columbia and following a more formal structure has proven beneficial to us, and we’re continuing to follow that model. While some of us do have more official ‘titles’ in this structure, we are continuing to lead things forward as a collective. We’ve always worked great together in a flat structure at the highest level and we’ll be continuing to lead with that for all decisions we make. We just need to designate folks to chair meetings, take notes, or do money things as needed. Heck, the new titles can’t be that serious; I won my title from James in a game of Rock Paper Scissors.

Under the umbrella of this overall Society Board, we now have working groups to manage individual projects. So we’ve taken some of the folks who were previously on ‘the OC’ and established the Desert Bus Prime Working Group. They’re tasked with focusing on the Desert Bus For Hope event we all currently know & love. We’ve slimmed the group down a bit to keep things simple, to help folks explore new ideas, and to give folks space to contribute at their level of availability. This was also where we each asked ourselves where we wanted to be and what we wanted to do. From the existing thirteen members of the organizing committee, some of us are in both groups, some are in new groups (more on that later), some are moving to be solely part of the society board, and one of us has taken this opportunity to retire.

As some of you may have seen earlier this summer, our own beloved “nomordinator” Serge Yager has decided to step down as an organizer and take this year off. It is impossible for me to overstate Serge’s many contributions to the event as an organizer for over 11 years, helping keep us fed, helping keep us organized, leading our many site managers & volunteers, and providing so much joy as an entertainment volunteer on Dawn Guard. Each and every one of us who’ve worked alongside him have so much love for Serge and we can’t wait to see what he’ll be working on next!

For the remaining folks in the Desert Bus Prime Working Group, we’ve had a few changes there too:

• Graham, Ian, & Paul will be less active here so they can focus on leading at the Society Board level
• With Serge retiring, James will be taking over as our new Logistics Coordinator, sharing more responsibilities with our site managers Sarah, Brett, & Paxton.
• Matt will be moving into a new role as our Entertainment Coordinator, helping manage our entertainment volunteers, our stage friends, and assisting the shifts in sharing more ideas, talent, & tech with each other
• Kathleen will be moving to take on the Guest Coordinator role, taking over from Matt
• Ashton, Beej, Erika, Fugi, Andrew, & Johnny will all continue to lead the same departments they have in previous years
• Well, technically Johnny and Andrew traded departments as a goof, but it wasn’t as funny as they thought it was, so everyone else made them trade back

The Second Summit

With an idea for our new leadership structure sketched out, we took time before the second summit to think it all through on our own and evaluate our many ideas with the new structure in mind. Between taking the time to do that and the general difficulties involved in scheduling anything with twelve busy adults, it was suddenly July when we met in Nanaimo for our second summit. We reviewed our previous ideas, added some new ones, checked in with each other about our new roles, and formally adopted this new model to move Desert Bus forward. With our leadership structure problem solved, we focused in deep on what new possibilities the future of Desert Bus could hold.

Additional Working Groups

For our first new working group, we will be establishing a Resource Sharing Working Group under the leadership of Graham Stark to look into ways we can share our knowledge & tools with other folks outside of our organization. As the world's longest running internet-based fundraiser, we have a lot of experience in this area that we’ve gained over the years. This group will primarily be looking to use our skills, our reach, and our knowledge to help marginalized folks in either establishing or improving their own charity fundraisers.

We’ve been working hard to prioritize diversity & inclusion within our event over the last few years, and this is a way we can also prioritize those values externally to help uplift other groups. While it hasn’t been previously formalized, this is an idea we’ve been talking about for years. We had to put it on the backburner a bit while we adapted our own event for the global pandemic, but now that we’ve got a handle on things we’re very excited to get back to moving this project forward.

Our last two working groups come with an important disclaimer: These two ideas are in the earliest of stages, exploratory work on them won’t even really start until 2024, and even then these things may never happen. We are excited though and we want to look into what could be possible, and what we would want to do together.

We will be putting together a Virtual Event Working Group under James’ leadership to explore the idea of doing a second, smaller & fully online, event that we would run at a different time in the calendar year. We’ll also be establishing a Live Event Working Group under my (Andrew’s) leadership, to explore  ideas around having more of a Desert Bus presence at conventions, as well as, potentially, even a future Desert Bus event we'd run with a live audience in attendance.

These aren’t the only working groups we’re looking into, but they are the three we're ready to share at this time and the three that we’re the most excited about. We may eventually decide to do neither of those two new ones, for any number of reasons, but right now we absolutely want to explore what possibilities those ideas might hold.

A big reason we were in favour of this new working group focused structure was that it felt like a way for more of our existing internal volunteers to become a bigger part of Desert Bus as well, if they have the interest & capacity. As these groups get established, those volunteers will be stepping into bigger roles in helping make our future ideas a reality. We want a clearer path for folks who, like myself & Serge, once started out as volunteers in some small capacity many years ago and now want to do more. To help make this weird & magical little cavalcade of generosity become something ever greater, as we continue to strive to help those in need.

What’s Next?

So, this has been a lot of words to put together and then end with ‘To Be Continued…’, but we do kinda have to end it that way because we’re only just getting started! For now, our focus is on our upcoming event in just a few short weeks (!), but for 2024 & beyond we here at Desert Bus For Hope are hoping to do even more and build on what we’ve all created so far together.

With all this in mind, we can’t wait to see you in chat for Desert Bus For Hope 2023, starting Saturday November 11th, 2023 at 2PM Pacific Time. On behalf of the new Desert Bus For Hope Society Board, I want to thank each and every one of you for your endless love and support. The spirit and generosity of our incredible community is what inspires us to reach ever higher and dream ever brighter than we thought possible.

As always and for ever,

For The Children.