How to do a OWW event?
Welcome to our 'Doing OWW' pages!
The Charity, OWW, will close in 2023, but you can continue to use these guidelines and the resources on this website (until 2025) to help you organise events.
Our hand book "Piecing Together One World" draws together 30 years' experience of putting on OWW events together with the insights from projects. It's an easy-to-read guide to everything you need to know about putting on a OWW event. This is well worth a careful read.
If you want a one page guide to take to a planning meeting, download Ten Top Tips here
The key to a successful OWW lies in having clear objectives, careful planning, good teamwork and events which involve and inspire your community in celebration, learning, hope and action.
Whether you have been running a OWW event for a number of years as part of an established OWW group, or if you are a member of a local organisation and would like to use one of your regular meeting to focus on OWW issues, or if you are an individual wanting to get started, the following pages are designed to help you make the most of what you choose to do.
Whatever you do, be green! Because a sustainable planet is essential to underpin all the improvements we seek. So, please strive to make your event environmentally friendly, by raising the awareness of everyone involved to: minimise waste, single use plastics, pollution and water consumption; encourage use of modes of transport which minimise environmental impact (e.g. tell people how to get to your event by public transport); choose environmentally friendly options for serving food and drinks and re-use and re-cycle all waste and unwanted products.
Once your event is finalised, don’t forget to publicise it in the press , on social media and in local shops, noticeboards.
Good luck with your planning for your OWW event!
These pages offer help with various aspects of organising local OWW events:
OWW for your local organisation
Consider inserting a OWW event into the regular calendar of a group or organisation you are involved with locally.
Forming a new local OWW group
This page has all sorts of hints about finding people to work with and suggestions of resources to help you tell them about OWW.
This page points you to partner/ supporter organisations which OWW has worked with nationally - many of them have local supporters and activists you could work with in your area.
A section suggests organisations it might be especially appropriate to work with on environmental issues and themes.
Including cultures and faiths
Working together with people of a variety of cultures and faiths requires sensitivity and respect. This page introduces advice, much of it from the Inter Faith Network, to help you organise activities that will be acceptable to most faiths. It will enable you to plan inclusive events that will be accessible to all. It can help you find local inter faith organisations. We need to remember that the purpose of bringing people from various faiths together in OWW is not to hold an inter faith event of itself, valuable as those are - it is to share perspectives on the global issues addressed in the annual theme.
Tried and tested event ideas
Here you can find lots of ideas which have been reported back to us by organisers who have tried them. They can be adapted to different themes.
Case Studies
These page shares the experiences of OWW organisers of a wide range of events including events that set out to involve people from many faiths and cultures to school programmes for OWW organised by teachers. Visit these page to see how it's done and be inspired.
Funding Opportunities
You can, of course, have a very valuable event without it costing anything but sometimes you want to hire a hall, pay speakers fees and expenses, pay for the ingredients a refugee group has agreed to cook for your event, have professionally produced publicity material etc. This page has suggestions about grant funding for events and activities, some of them very easy to apply for and at least one OWW groups made a successful application for lottery funding in 2016.