NEWS  |
YOUROPE – THE EUROPEAN FESTIVAL ASSOCIATION Yourope, the European Festival Association is in its 10th year after being founded in November 1998 and more active than ever. The association currently has 54 members, being amongst the most well established festivals in Europe. New members like the Oxygen Festival in Ireland, the Montreux Jazz Festival Switzerland or the Nova Rock in Austria recently joined the association. All Yourope members are dedicated to improving the European festival scene in terms of working conditions, health and safety issues, environmental awareness and in promoting the cross-border exchange of live music talent. The overall aim of the association is to collaborate and share experience and to pinpoint areas that would benefit from a joint approach. Yourope is founding partner of the European Talent Exchange Programm (www.etep.nl) and the live music lobby for the European Live Music Forum (www.elmf.eu). From 2006-2008, Yourope, in cooperation with the ILMC Safety Focus Group, organised six health & safety seminars for festival security staff from all over Europe. The next seminar will take place on January 16, 2009 during the Eurosonic Festival in Groningen. In 2006/7, the association launched environmental guidelines for music festivals. The original printed booklet "Green'n'Clean" has been supplemented by a new online tool, providing festival organisers with customised environmental advice plus a «Green'n'Clean Award» for festivals who achieve a defined number of criterias in terms of environmental measures. So far, 18 Yourope members have achieved the necessary points and have received the «Green'n'Clean Award» (see the list in the Green'n'Clean section). This October 2008, Yourope in cooperation with Virtual Festivals launched the first pan-European Festival portal eu.virtualfesstivals.com which will seek to aggregate more than 3000 music festivals, 20,000 performing artists and 50 Million festival-goers across 45 countries (See more details under the section Virtual Festivals Europe) Besides these main topics, Yourope will focus on marketing and sponsoring issues in cooperation with conference partners all over Europe.
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