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One of our 2018 BWB Micro Grant recipients is Guardians of the Vibe from Portland, Oregon

Guardians of the Vibe is a project birthed from the Portland music and festival community. The literature and workshop programming focuses on inspiring conscious bystanders, consent education, non gendered language, and fun! They believe that together we can create a socially mindful safety web to help protect and inform one another through the power of words and action. As a literature based consent/bystander intervention project, the BWB grant funds went to printing costs for free literature, covering 80% of expenses.

Project leader and organization President, Marji Marlowe, says more:

Civic responsibility and communal effort are the principles exemplified in our project. Guardians of the Vibe is only an idea without the help and reciprocation from our community. We believe at Guardians of the Vibe that it is our civic duty to disperse the literature for free or at minimal cost to cover our printing costs. All of our literature is available for free on our website for you to print at home!

With the help of the BWB funds we were able to display our first indoor table at an event in town. Two people ran the table. However, it is hard to put a cap on how many people have helped develop and display our project.  Me and our graphic designer/Vice-President, Erika Ryn, have done a lot of the execution, but we could not do it without the effort of our community at large! The project has been a labor of love and family.

Our project addresses how consent is the ultimate way to interact with new friends, lovers, family, or anyone in your life. We make a big point through colorful, non-gendered, illustrated reading. We also have workshops that go with our literature that we have presented at festivals and are currently working on curriculum for school presentations here in Oregon. Consent is a “hot topic” right now because the verbiage around it is switching many people’s current paradigm of how they have been interacting with others their entire lives. We want to make those conversations and that learning a little easier, accessible, and more fun! Thousands of people have interacted with this project. We have displayed literature at music festivals, conferences, music venues, and at college campuses.

Our community has been changed due to the amount of conversation the project has sparked, especially in the music/festival community. For a long time I felt there was a lot of denial from promoters and patrons that consent infractions, sexual assault, and rape were happening at their events. Everyone wanted their community to be exempt from those toxic happenings. We have been a project since before the social media movement #MeToo  and I want to clarify that “Me too” has been a movement since long before celebrities/Facebook caught wind of it. We have Tarana Burke to thank for the initial implementation of the movement. However, the conversation around our project changed after the #MeToo publicity happened in 2017. So many promoters and community members wanted to have these hard conversations and normalize how we use consent, so they turned to us! We have posters permanently installed in 4 venues, we partner with 2 major production companies, and we are currently starting to have public round table discussions. Not only has the conversation around consent changed in our community, but more people are wanting to get trained as active bystanders, which has overall created a more conscious safety web around our community. I am so excited to see how these conversations continue to evolve!

To get in touch with Guardians of the Vibe, find their website, facebook, insta, or e-mail.

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