Humus is a 3-year Volunteering Teams project in High Priority Areas, aimed at creating more resilient communities fostering a healthy lifestyle and collective action on climate change as well as nurturing a sense of community to foster social inclusion, mobilizing young volunteers and enhancing civic and community engagement in local contexts.
Humus – Co-creating a Festival for imagining Queer Futures, is one of the volunteering teams activities that took place in Riga Latvia in September 2025 and was hosted and organized by our organization.
The project involved 15 volunteers from European countries – Latvia, Greece, Italy, Spain, Sweden, Moldova, Azerbaijan, Germany and a team of 5 professionals in youth work, Queer education and activism, mentorship, and more, who are experienced in the different methods and tools that were used during the project, in the process of co-creating the festival and organizing this volunteering opportunity.
The main focus of the project was the co-creation of Radical Imagination of Our Time!, a queer performing arts festival made by queer people for queer community and allies. Volunteer team members owned their experience in a month filled with creativity, self and collective expression, queer and trans joy, variety of organizational tasks, creating audio-visual content, rehearsing, exchanging stories and experiences, engaging with the local communities, performing, learning, unlearning, holding space for magic to happen and so much more!
Below you can read through their stories and experience, as shared by part of the crew.
This project was an excellent opportunity to connect with my community, learn more about myself, my body, and movement, and build new meaningful connections.
I rediscovered and deepened my interest for dance and performance art, strengthened the link between my body and mind, and learned a lot about co-creating a joyful festival with others.
This experience helped me realize that in my career, I would like to create in a wider range of forms rather than just one – by implementing movement, and through connecting and co-creating with others rather than solely by myself. I also learned about the full process of developing a group performance from scratch, which I believe will be very useful for my future personal creative projects.
Overall, the festival, as well as the whole month of preparation for it, became an incredibly full, meaningful, and transformative experience for me. Throughout it, I gained a lot of valuable knowledge and beautiful memories. It helped me feel more at home in my body, even in public, non-queer spaces, as well as expand my network of queer community and friends across the globe, for which I am very, very grateful.
There are so many things I could write down here. The Humus project and RIOT festival was a lot of things and to me it still is a lot of things.
RIOT means collectively imagining what the world can look like and actually being excited for those futures instead of devastated.
RIOT means experiencing queer joy, celebration and pleasure and equally holding the space for queer grief to exist at the same time. RIOT means pluralities and interconnection.
RIOT means knowing our queer bodies will carefully hold each other in movement, always.
For me, co-creating this festival was a month full of magical moments.
Starting from the morning check in, to working together and individually every day, to going to events after work or on the weekends, and eventually hosting the festival and seeing everyone’s efforts and ideas come to life for the first time.
In this project, I felt safe to explore my creativity and connect it with my identity, as well as trying to portray the essence of the project. I would love to repeat this experience again if I could!
This project was a total shift of energy and perspective for me, i went from doubting myself and the worth of my work to believe that what i do matters and it is indeed worth it, everything that happened during that month gave me a huge boost of confidence.
The whole Active Rainbow team was a safe space and it still is till this day, working with them hand to hand to create this beautiful RIOT! was a dream come true, the creative freedom they gave me and all the other volunteers was the key to end up with the heartfelt, emotional festival we got to enjoy.
I highly recommend to work with them in any project they have going on, kind and beautiful people can only make kind and beautiful things 🙂
The Humus Project was a tender, profound, and transformative journey. It taught me to cherish my creativity and start deconstructing many pressures that society, and we ourselves, impose on us.
Feeling part of an authentic and diverse queer community, where vulnerability is welcomed, made me feel seen and cared for. This project was a confirmation of how art and people can contribute to your healing and growth process, especially in difficult moments. It gave me strength, filled me with inspiration, and strengthened my desire to keep nurturing the queer community, creating, and honouring our art.
For the future, I hope to remain involved in non-formal education initiatives like this one and be rejoined with the beautiful queer community we created, maybe in Riga, a city that holds a lot of memories already and surprised me.
You can find more information about the festival and its programme in this link https://riotfestival.carrd.co/#