As swarms of musicians, press and dedicated music lovers prepare to ascend on downtown Raleigh for Hopscotch Music Festival, there is a designated group of individuals ready to ensure that tickets are taken, doors are checked and the chaos is reigned in.
Hopscotch is the brainchild of Independent Weekly marketing director Greg Lowenhagen, who serves as the festival’s director, and Independent Weekly music editor Grayson Currin, the festival’s curator.
Lowenhagen and Currin have added more than 100 volunteers to this weekend’s team, assigning a variety of tasks to ensure that the festival goes off without a hitch.
“The volunteers are the festival, in the sense that rather quickly it turns from essentially two of us doing the lion’s share of the work to all of a sudden becoming a team of 130 people,” said Lowenhagen.
Volunteers are scheduled for seven hours at one of several festival locations, including taking tickets at City Plaza or organizing lines by wristband type at club venues. In return, they receive a t-shirt and a pass to attend shows on alternate days of the festival.
But on a simpler level, Hopscotch volunteers are the most tangible representation of the work it takes to plan an intricate, time-consuming event.
“It’s not going to be me who is interacting with the fans at the doors and it’s not going to be me who is taking tickets at City Plaza — it’s them,” said Lowenhagen. “In a way, when you have to throw a team together to pull an event off, they become sort of the face of your event.”
Although volunteers filled out an application and were interviewed via e-mail or telephone, Lowenhagen said that they were simply looking for people who were excited about the festival’s prospects and who could handle the expected responsibilities.
Volunteers attended mandatory training to explain the general schedule and emphasize the importance of commitment. Gretchen Gaskill, one of four unpaid Independent Weekly interns working with Hopscotch, headed up the volunteer coordinating and scheduling.
“I’ve learned a lot of things about logistics, and I’ve pretty much focused for the last six or seven months on the volunteer aspect of it, which I had absolutely no experience going into it,” said Gaskill.
