Rosaleen helps Make It Happen at music festivals

A Rutherglen woman is taking her charity message to Scotland’s biggest music festival after causing a splash at Glastonbury.

Former Trinity High pupil Rosaleen Kelly (37) has worked as a communications advisor for WaterAid for the past three years.

Rosaleen, who was brought up on Woodside Avenue, was at the Somerset festival last month to promote WaterAid’s Make It Happen campaign, and she’ll be doing the same at T in the Park this weekend at its new home in Strathallan.

The Make it Happen campaign wants to ensure everyone in the world has access to safe water and sanitation. The charity aims to collect 100,000 signatures on a petition to ask the UK Government to make sure the Sustainable Development Goals includes a target to reach everyone, everywhere with taps and toilets by 2030

At Glastonbury, Rosaleen helped gather an impressive 46,166 signatures for the petition.

As well as campaigning, Rosaleen and her fellow WaterAid volunteers handed out drinking water to festivalgoers, collected rubbish for recycling, and manned the toilets.

Each WaterAid volunteer worked shifts of four to six hours a day – the same amount of time many in the developing world spend collecting water.

She was also helping to run ShePee – a female urinal which saves ladies having to queue for busy portaloos and looked after the “loo with a view”. This highlighted the lack of privacy which many face as they have nowhere safe and private to go to the loo.

Rosaleen says a music festival can be the ideal place to raise awareness of Water Aid’s goals.

She said: “There’s 2.5 billion people in the world who don’t have anywhere safe or private to go to the toilet. A festival is a good place as it highlights, to an extent, the problems many people face that we just take for granted.

“In festivals you’re always thirsty and a lot of the time need the toilet, but there’s usually a lack of places to go! These are the problems people face in the developing world, but much worse and on a daily basis.

“Otherwise people go behind trees and that’s bad for the environment and actually threatens the festival as it can harm the water supply.

“It’s a great feeling to know that we’ve really made an impact – with all those signatures, we can expect our government to use their influence to ensure the UN makes water and sanitation a priority for all.”

Despite working hard, Rosaleen did manage to catch some of the acts: “We saw Paul Weller and Kanye West. We were dancing while we worked on the Saturday night to the Who as well!

Overall Rosaleen was delighted with the response from Glastonbury, and is looking forward to taking their message to Scotland’s biggest festival this weekend: “For the last few years we have done the same at T in the Park and festival- goers are always keen to help when they hear about the challenges that millions of people across the world face every day.

“We haven’t worked out the shifts at T yet, but I’d quite like to see Avicii and maybe Noel Gallagher!”

For more information go to: www.wateraid.org/makeithappen.