We Are The Fair head of production Yasmin Galletti discusses her career, the inspiration behind her new female-led events firm We Are Ops and the issues of gender balance and diversity in the live events industry.
What inspired you to get involved in events, and how/when did it happen?
I’ve always been a big lover of dance music and I used to go to Fabric every Friday night as I lived down the road. When I was 19 I bumped into a friend who was organising a rave, and I thought, “wow I didn’t think you could do this as a job!”. I ended up doing a lot of free flyering and helping out in that drum and bass music scene. Then I started working for a company called Found Series and Eastern Electrics (EE), which is obviously an existing client for us at the Fair. I started my festival career producing the first-ever EE festival in 2012. It was a disaster, but the audience loved it, and we managed to come back for more.
Why was it a disaster?
Everything was against us, we were doing it in a place called Area 12, which is now a park in Greenwich but was a car park at the time. Obviously Greenwich was the hub for the Olympics and this was taking place during the Olympics. So the police didn’t want it to happen, it was supposed to be a part of a big scheme where a developer was contributing lots of infrastructure but that fell through. We managed to pull it off but it was basically a bunch of wedding marquees in a car park. It was a really amazing show.
What led you to want to launch a female-led events operation?
I’ve been working at the Fair for five years now and when I started there were only four of five of us. The directors Nick [Morgan] and Rob [Dudley] are amazing people and have always developed women in the industry. I started to recognise that there were a lot of women joining our team and while production in the industry looked like it was becoming more balanced in terms of people on the ground, the health and safety companies that you see – nothing against them they’re all amazing but it’s always the same type of people that show up on-site, and the same websites with masculine-looking energy. One thing a lot of clients kept saying is, “Thank you for explaining that to me, I’m normally too scared to ask questions but you don’t make me feel stupid when I ask questions.” I think that’s something I’ve always felt and I think it’s a quality of women working in health and safety or ops, which there are loads of, can bring to the table.
Will We Are Ops be exclusively staffed by females?
No, there are men that we already work with and if we come across the right person who has the same approach then we would employ more men. I think the idea is that the faces of the company are the senior women from The Fair. Our method of working with people on-site, the way we work with stakeholders, will be led by females.
How many people are involved in the company and how do you see this expanding in the coming years?
There’s four females, and obviously Nick and Rob who go out to do safety shifts. We are focused on the festival side now but we do a lot of placemaking activations. We’d like to expand into that area, around stakeholder engagement, sustainability. We’ve done a lot of up-skilling of our team during Covid – training in suitability and events for example. We’d always loved to grow the team, but we don’t want to force that, it will happen naturally and organically as the client base grows.
What ambitions do you have for the company?
I think a growing market focused not just on sustainability but also community-led stakeholder engagement. We do that a lot with our festivals Gala and EE, engaging with the local community. It’s something we now have started to do with a lot of our placemaking clients, property developers and the councils. Diversity, quality, and inclusion are a real passion of mine in the industry and something we need to work on together, community engagement really feeds into that. I’m now co-chair of the AIF steering group, so I’d like to develop that alongside Ops.
“I think we’re going to see a lot more women working in health and safety.”
What projects are currently in the pipeline?
One of our existing festival clients is looking at doing something that crosses the festival and public realm orders over the winter, which could be an exciting project. Post-Covid a lot of festivals clients have greater ambitions to do their shows at more points throughout the year. We’ll see more of a crossover of people using interesting spaces which require planning permissions and greater local authority engagement, but all throughout the year.
Do you feel that the gender balance in the industry is being addressed sufficiently – and how best can it be addressed without positive discrimination?
I think we are having this conversation and therefore there are positive steps happening. I think there are so many amazing women already working in the industry that have always been pushing forward the female agenda. People like Claire Goodchild and Judie Beck from Boomtown, and lots of other women like Phoebe Roberts at Attitude is Everything – there are more women who have been working in the industry for 15-20 years now, who have got to a point of seniority where their voices are being heard and that’s positive. We’re only at the beginning and it’s going to keep growing. A huge area that needs to be looked at is people’s ethnic backgrounds. It’s a very white industry and that’s something that we’re looking at, AIF is looking at but I do think the entire narrative of the industry is still directed by the same demographic of white men over the age of 40, probably from a middle-class background. They’re the people having the conversations with DCMS and Public Health England about how to reopen the festival industry, they’re usually the headliners at conferences and until that starts to change, which I know EPS did a lot of work on, then the agenda will still be very male-dominated.
I think we’re going to see a lot more women working in health and safety. I think there’s a lot of work to do in a lot of different areas and departments, but I think things are moving rapidly with that now. Claire [Goodchild] at the EPS panel said the only way we’ll get to that point is if people are prepared to be transparent and open with each other. The industry has traditionally been closed off and that’s led to women not feeling like they can talk about their experiences on-site where they get talked down to or patronised. What I’ve noticed over the past year since Covid happened – as Claire said – is that we’ve all been prepared to open up a bit more about the experiences that we’ve had. I will now speak about other women in the industry and how amazing they are at their job, rather than thinking: “I can’t introduce her to people, because then people won’t hire us to do the work.” We need to lift up all women and all people coming from other minority groups and be open about it – sometimes to the detriment of ourselves or our own profit margins – if we want the industry to change.
Who or what has been the biggest inspiration for you in the events industry?
The people I work with every day. I’m really inspired by Nick and Rob, how hardworking Rob is, the way Nick approached Covid – I’ve never seen anyone that’s just so constantly fighting for the festival industry and also his business. That’s really inspiring. Even people who come into our offices from our new kickstarters scheme; we have a young girl called Liberty who’s been wanting to join our company for so long and she’s done all these amazing things off her own back. She’s been promoting her own club nights, setting up her own website, and her dedication to getting into the industry really inspired me as well. I think it’s really difficult to get into usually and it’s about who you know so her persistence was inspiring to me.
What is the first career highlight that comes to mind?
Probably when Andy C headlined El Dorado festival in 2019 because he was my idol when I was about 15 or 16. That was a tick-box for me. Also the first time I was an event director of my own show, which was when I was working at The Fair in 2017 on Gala Festival. That was the first time I realised the pressure of being an event director on a show of 10,000 people, being the sole person responsible for their safety –also knowing that your peers trust you to take on that responsibility, so that was a highlight for me.
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