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Tokonatsu 2021 - Running Update

By Colin Barker | Friday, 12 March 2021

At the end of February, the UK Government announced a roadmap for the lifting of the lockdown over the course of the next few months. This past weekend the Tokonatsu team held a meeting to discuss this announcement and how it could affect the festival this year.

I am happy to announce that currently, Tokonatsu 2021 is still running as planned. As expected, however, we will keep a keen eye on the current situation so that we can take any necessary action to ensure everybody’s safety.

While this is not an absolute guarantee that Tokonatsu 2021 will run, we plan to run a socially distanced, Covid-safe event. Restrictions will be lifted as the law allows, with the safety of all attendees and team as our highest priority.

We understand that some events have made the decision to cancel. We know how difficult this must have been, but we support our friends at other conventions across the UK in their choice to keep the UK community safe.

Most conventions held in the UK take place in hotels, campuses, or event halls. Some will have a few hundred attendees, others thousands, and others more still. It’s a lot of human bodies in relatively small spaces – a real risk factor for conflu, let alone a highly infectious disease. Where Tokonatsu is an exclusively outdoors event, we have very different things to consider when evaluating if it’s safe to run or not.

Since the beginning of the pandemic, the team has worked hard behind the scenes to understand new laws enacted, effect changes, and complete thorough risk assessments, with regular meetings to ensure all are on track.

Over the next few weeks, we will publish our risk assessments, policies, and procedures, so you can see what we are doing in an effort to make Tokonatsu 2021 safe. We also hope that the work our volunteers have put into our documentation will be useful to other events and conventions as they navigate this new territory.

We’ll continue to bring in updates as we have them, and shall also let you know whenever we publish a new document. As a starting point, we’ve released Tokonatsu’s Safeguarding Policy over at GitHub! It is still a work in progress, so if you have any comments or suggestions, please let us know by contacting us thought the GitHub Repo linked before.

Thank you all for your patience. As always, stay strong, stay safe, and above all continue to be amazing!

Colin Barker - Myst

Chairman


Everyone is welcome to join us on Discord: Join the Tokonatsu Discord Server

Here’s some handy links we’d recommend if you want advice or help during this time:

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Colin Barker

Chairman of Tokonatsu, soon I will post something useful here!