Friendship Groups

Volunteering as a steward with your friends or family is a lot of fun as you get to enjoy your festival time off together!

What are Friendship Groups?

When volunteering as a steward, 'Friendship Groups' help us to match you with your friends or family. We will do our best to make sure everyone in your group has their shifts at the same time (although not always in the same place).

You can link up with up to five friends in a group.

How does it work?

You'll find the "Friendship Group" section on each festival-specific page of your profile. Here you can choose to either organise a new friendship group or join an existing one. Every group has one organiser, who sets up the group and then invites their friends to join it.

Organising a Group

To organise a group, select "Organise a Group", and then hit save. After saving, the page will display a code. Give this code to your friends who have also signed up to volunteer at the festival, and they can use it to join your group.

You can come back to your profile at any time to see who has joined your group.

Joining a Group

To join a group you'll need a code from the group's organiser. Once you have this, select "Join a Group", enter the code, and then hit save.

After saving you'll be able to see a list of who else is in the group with you.

Friendship Group FAQs

You can leave a group by returning to the Friendship Group section of your profile, and selecting "No friendship group".

Once the cancellation deadline has passed for the festival, the profile page will be locked and you will not be able to change your Friendship Group online. To leave after the cancellation deadline, please contact us on festivals@oxfam.org.uk.

If you are the group organiser, you can remove other people from your group by clicking the symbol beside their name. Be aware that they will not be able to re-join once you've removed them.

If you are not the organiser of a group, you can't remove others from it (but you can leave the group yourself).

This is likely to be caused by one of the following:

  • The code is incorrect.
  • The group organiser has disbanded the group.
  • The code refers to a valid group, but it's for a different festival.

If you joined a group, but have now returned to your profile to find you are no longer a member, one of two things has happened:

  1. The organiser has disbanded the entire group.
  2. The organiser has decided to remove you from the group.

You should contact the group organiser to find out what has happened, or you could use the instructions above to organise your own group instead.

After the cancellation date, we lock some sections of the profile, including the friendship group section.

After this date, you can still leave a group by contacting the office. It's unlikely we will be able to make any other changes to groups (such as joining a group) after the cancellation date, as we will have started building the roster for the festival.

A Friendship Group only applies to a single festival, so if you are volunteering with us at more than one event this summer, then you need to make sure you're in a group for every festival that you want to volunteer at together with friends.

Don't worry! Lots of people come on their own, and volunteering at a festival is a great way to meet new people and make new friends. The Oxfam volunteer community are super friendly and welcoming.

Festival campaigners all work the same shifts, so you also have the same free time off together!

We work in small groups decided on site and we mix these up over the week, so you'll be working with lots of different people. This is part of the joy of festival campaigning so please be prepared to work with people you might not know yet - we're sure you will become fast friends!

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