Kiwiburn is all about contributing our time, skills, and participating in the community. We are making some changes to help share the love and the workload between everyone.
By ‘volunteering’ we mean contributing your time and skills in an agreed role, as the basis for you getting your ticket. This usually means a minimum of 2 shifts competently completed. Shifts range from 4 – 12 hours depending on the role.
Exciting changes for 2025!
- We are making it clearer when a volunteer role comes with a ticket, to make it easier for you to plan ahead (you still need to pay for the ticket!)
- We are shifting towards 100% volunteer tickets over the next 2 years
- KB25 will only have 450 general release tickets (20%)
- KB26 will have zero general release tickets (0%)
So volunteering is the best way to be able to purchase a ticket, and escape the madness of the lottery.
If you don’t want to help make Kiwiburn happen, that’s fine; but this event isn’t for you. It’s really what it’s all about.
If you don’t know how to help make Kiwiburn happen, fear not! We can support you to find the right role.
What if I’m not able-bodied / free all January / bad ass like Digger Daddy?
You may have heard that KB roles involve hard physical labour, dark and deep underground, with no food, water, or hope of escape. Whilst this may be true, there are also a myriad of roles to suit everyone’s needs and abilities.
There are roles that suit first-timers, people with accessibility needs, neurological needs, limited time availability, limited finances, or difficult travel requirements. There are roles for people who are socially anxious, or need low stim environments. There are roles for all tastes, skills, and interests and we will prioritise roles to match peoples’ needs.
Currently the motherload is carried by a small molten core of humans, which is neither sustainable, fair, democratic, effective, or healthy. If we split all these roles and share the load, each role becomes easier, and noone burns out.
What counts as volunteering?
Work that you are gifting to the Kiwiburn community, that you weren’t going to do anyway.
Here are some examples:
In a Theme Camp…
- Running a theme camp (key organisers, who work their asses off year-round, organising fundraisers, herding all the cats, and spreading all the spreadsheets
- Doing shifts as a responsible host at a bar/event/workshop
- Doing shifts as a consent guardian at your theme camp
- Doing shifts monitoring the sound levels all night.
In any camp
- Doing shifts to support the access needs of someone in your camp (eg carework)
- Looking after hordes of children, so their parents can get high/low/away from the madness.
Doing shifts during the event
- Rangers, Sanitation, Gate, Greeters, MPW, Medics, Perimeter, Fire Safety, Internal Safety, Traffic, Consent Club, Sanctuary, Depot, Kitchen, Hut Hub, Artery, Centre Stage, Kitchen, Sound, HQ, Site Management, Event Delivery and more.
Roles during build or packdown:
- Kitchen, MPW, Infrastructure, Town Planning, External Safety, Crew Support, Temple build, Effigy build MOOP and more.
Doing year-round roles:
- Team leads, Co-leads, Facilitators, 2ICs, IT, Ticketing, Comms Team, Kiwiburn Art Committee, Conduct Committee and more.
I always contribute! Am I volunteering?
Volunteering self-test
Planning to contribute? Ask yourself:
- Is this different from how I usually participate at a party?
- Is it as helpful for the community as it is for you?
- Is this contribution pre-planned and agreed upon with your camp/ team/ department?
- Are you staying straight and sober so you can do this thing safely and competently?
- Would most people at Kiwiburn agree what you’re doing is helpful for the community?
- Would most people at Kiwiburn feel you are pulling your weight?
If you answer YES to all these questions, it sounds like you’re volunteering. Thanks!
If you answer NO to any of these questions, it might be a fun and worthwhile thing to do, but most probably doesn’t count as volunteering, in terms of scoring a ticket.
What doesn’t count as volunteering?
This is something we have to work out collectively, and it’s never going to please everyone. Perhaps this debate is best settled with nang wrestling. Here’s a list of things that probably don’t count.
- Allowing lowly plebs to bask in your glorious presence
- Bringing great vibes/banter/sparkles to place
- Looking after yourself (but it’s a great idea)
- Looking after your own dependents (but it’s a really great idea)
- Working on a fabulous project / event / feast / shenanigan that is only seen by yourself and your campmates.
- Making camp furniture that you are also going to use at home all year
- Making an art thingy that you are taking to all the other festivals too (all good, share the love, maybe get a grant, but you’ll still need to find a volly role in the Kiwiburn community).
- All the nice things you do for your campmates and friends just because that’s the kind of lovely person you are.
Am I doing enough?
The above list includes many fabulous things, but they won’t get a ticket, because they don’t fit the
Communal effort magic formula:
Kiwiburn = Individual community effort X 2400 people
So you can ask yourself; does whatever-I’m-doing X 2400 people = Kiwiburn?
Yes? —> You’re contributing!
No? —-> You’re doing something else. Which is great, enjoy, all power to you. But we also need you to do some of the chores too!
Hey, this seems pretty Socialist. I thought we were Libertarian
Great point! Thanks for bringing it up. It would be naive to say politics doesn’t shape how we do things at Kiwiburn. There are certainly some strong Socialist (or even Communist) values in the burner principles, and the way we organise. It could be claimed that both Burning Man and subsequently Kiwiburn emerged as a counter-cultural response to neo-liberal capitalism, with it’s strong emphasis on individual freedoms and private property, and absence of collective community. Burns are fundementally collectivist in how they organise. (BM is one of the only places in the US with free health care).
Burns are also fundementally libertarian having evolved in response to authoritative systems of control, with a strong ‘you-can’t-tell-me-what-to-do’ vibe. This is evident in the principles and perhaps we owe our kooky creativity to this freedom to be unoppressed.
Let’s also bear in mind that the principles were written by BMs founder after watching the event grow for a few years, to attempt to bring out more of what he felt helped the community grow, and reign in the behaviours that hindered. They are a great starting point, and much loved. They are also cut and pasted directly from a dominant white culture, written by one man, and don’t always hit the mark here, in our context, in our community.
This kinda stuff needs to be written by all of us. Noone is claiming to have the perfect model, but if we collaborate, hopefully we can create our best attempt at it.
If volunteering comes with the chance to buy a ticket, isn’t that against the principle of Decommodification?
That’s a great question. In a way yes, but in a way we’ve already been doing this, with an opaque arrangement where team leads have tickets assigned to them and they distribute them to the people they think will turn up and complete their shifts.
Decommodification is about encouraging gifting without expectation of reward. Where this gets murky is defining reward. Assuming we are talking non-monetary rewards, it seems fair to define this as something that has value to the recipient. There aren’t many things we would do on the paddock that don’t bring a perceived value
