WOW goes virtual

Necessity gives birth to invention. In March 2020 the WOW team saw the urgency of creating an online space where women and girls could share their apprehensions and strategies as lockdown created the potential for the biggest financial, cultural, social and domestic fracture in the equality pathway in our lifetime. We had absolutely no experience but we felt we simply had to step up fast. 

WOW – Women of the World – uses the creativity, ebullience and egalitarianism of the festival form to connect thousands of stories of the achievements and resilience of girls, women and non-binary peoples across the globe. 

Ten years since its foundation, WOW works with communities across every continent to build live festival gatherings at all scales. Over 2 million have taken part so far: from 400 indigenous women creating work alongside white settler women in Katherine, a tiny and remote town in NW Australia, to exuberant and powerful outpourings of 92,000 festivalgoers in Rio, clamouring for recognition and change. 

Radical steps and radical thinking

WOW’s artistic practise is all about celebration through live encounter. Or it was. But Covid forced both radical steps and radical thinking.The lockdown axe hovered over our London WOW at Southbank during International Women's Week. Looking back, maybe there was a fin de siècle intensity during those exhilarating days but we certainly ended feeling thrilled and exhausted. A good combination. 

Like dominos falling, our festivals across the world all announced postponement or cancellation. At the same time, the impact of global lockdown laid bare the frightening reality for so many girls and women. The burden of home schooling on women, the disproportionate job losses for the female workforce, the intensity and vulnerability for nurses and care workers, mostly women, and the surge in domestic violence quickly produced a sense of alarm and despair. 

In the face of this intense spike in inequality, alongside the isolation women experienced as daily news bulletins rarely referred to these issues, we decided we needed to provide a space for collaborative conversations, encounters, debate and a spirit of hope.

Permanent organisational change

What followed has was a year of intense online work and learning that has changed our organisation forever. We set up zoom calls consulting with partners across the globe and the UK. All agreed that we needed to share information and find some positivity. 

We rang the BBC and expressed the urgency for a women-led cultural weekend which resulted in our inclusion in their Culture in Quarantine programme. We also received a promise that we could produce 48 hours of programming appealing to audiences of different ages and backgrounds. We shared both excitement and terror. The workload was immense, the challenge too big to fully face up to, but the opportunity was wonderful. 

However, there was a snag. The BBC weekend could be broadcast only within the UK and therefore couldn’t reach some of our communities in places such as Karachi or Baltimore who’d been promised participation in this convening. 

So, we made a second decision. We would put on our WOW BBC festival in June but use it as a trial run for a bigger online WOW Global in July. This took the form of a 24-hour marathon crossing all continents, including girls and women from across the world, using all our WOW partnerships to create a world conversation.

Technological know-how

We set about researching all aspects of relevant technology, taking a crash course in handling multi-platforms and persuading speakers to trust our platforms, despite having no previous knowledge of Hop In, Blue Jeans, Teams, Zoom, etc except for the most basic meeting set up. We programmed hundreds of speakers and performers, activists, poets, politicians, educators, politicians and policymakers, and girls and women with powerful stories to share. 

The murder of George Floyd during the planning period accelerated calls for full recognition of racial injustice at all levels and sectors of society. We called on our WOW friends Angela Davies and Kimberlé Crenshaw to help chart new difficult conversations with the whole community. 

At the same time, we tried to ensure that the cruelty and injustice experienced by disabled women during this time was fully explored and that the hate and violence pitted against transwomen was called out. 

Planning for the future

By August we had held three back-to-back festivals and were planning Day of the Girl in October, and our next festival in March 2021. We launched the Creative Women's Network to support freelancers suffering economic freefall and identity loss. 

We created a new platform, WOW Sounds, for women and non-binary musicians.  And we built a young activists Directory for under 18s, and The Hope Brigade, a new online exhibition with Google Culture. Like everyone else, we were living inside a tornado, and had to survive and be useful where we could be.
 
We’re now planning our first live event. We can’t wait to get back to the sheer exuberance of live festivals. We’ve gained skills and wisdom and friendships in this most curious of years. And we will never go back to thinking of the virtual world as an optional extra.

Jude Kelly CBE is Founder and Director of The WOW Foundation