OM Festival

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The Om Community

The OM Festival was a summer-solstice festival that ran annually in southern Ontario for 7 years beginning in 1998 and ending in 2005. The festival featured music, dance and art, and encouraged its attendees to participate by volunteering.

The annual gathering attracted people who considered themselves knowledge-seekers, environmentalists, spiritual travellers and other individuals who sought the enlightenment of the human spirit.

Ideals espoused by the core group of festival organizers and participants were togetherness, freedom, volunteering and spiritual tolerance and exploration.

Former festival attendees or current Message Board members sometimes call themselves OMIEs.

1 Sumkidz
2 Volunteering
3 Re:Union Festival
4 See also
5 External links

[edit] Sumkidz

The Festival was organized and maintained by the Sumkidz, a group of young artists and activists living in and around Toronto, Ontario.

View a Vider Collage of Reunion 2006 at http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7437221034614954043

[edit] Volunteering

The organizers of the festival relied on volunteer workers to make everything happen. Hopeful volunteers would attend meetings in Toronto several weeks prior to the festivities, and roles would be assigned. When people volunteer, the festival is more personal and something that they care more about.

Volunteers can choose to work in the Kind Kitchen, on foot patrol (security and first aid), in the child care areas, on clean up, or in several other positions. Those who gave their time and effort to sustain the festival received a free ticket, although they were required to purchase a t-shirt identifying them as OM crew. In later years (2004 and 2005), volunteers were issued a laminated card which identified them as members of the festival.

[edit] Re:Union Festival

Longtime attendees and administrators continue to stay in contact and create similar gatherings and events. In 2005, Sumkidz organizers created the Re:Union Festival to facilitate their claims of further development of their particular style of electronic music as well as what they see as the spiritual development of individuals in their global peacekeeping movement. Although the Re:Union Festival was complained about by some local townsfolk, and drew the attention of the [[Ontario Provincial Police], the OMIEs continue to celebrate their legacy of promoting safe harm reduction training and techniques as well as the fostering of new ideas integral to the alternative energy movement.

The "Om Reunion Project" (ORP) threw its second gathering in 2006 under the name - In:Tent, Cultivating a Kinder-Garden Through Beans and Beats- Where Om took the form of a festival of aproximately 2000+ people with aproximately 10+ sound stages in addition to its various workshops and "Themecamps" and lasted for a weekend, the more recent projects have lasted for a full week and have had 2 sound stages. This changing of scales allows for more of a relaxed community building focus rather than what some worried had become for many a somewhat overwhelming party. The party aspect has been retained in the past two years with music on the night of the Solstice and during the weekend. The additional time allows for people to develop more extensive relationships with each other and more space to gestate culturally progressive projects.

The gathering in 2007 will again take place during the week of the summer solstice.