The founders of the Robson Valley Music Festival are using recycled tires and straw bales to construct a creative retreat, in hopes of generating additional revenue for the August event.
“The society needs to generate more income because the festival just barely pays for itself,” said Shara Gustafson, who founded the Dunster festival with her partner Seth Macdonald in 2005.
Construction of the creative retreat—which sits on the festival grounds, which is also Macdonald and Gustafson’s backyard—began in 2013 after the Robson Valley Music Society received a $50,000 grant from the government of British Columbia to build an Earthship. An Earthship is an self-sustaining, eco-friendly building constructed out of recycled and natural materials.
The project has been ongoing since 2013, but recently funds have run dry.
So, in an effort to see the project through to completion, the creative duo has launched a crowd-funding campaign on Kickstarter asking for up to $50,000 by the end of June.
Gustafson said her dream is to see people using the space for music recording, yoga retreats and even weekend getaways.
“There’s a huge common space on the upper floor, it’s a huge wide open space, so it could be used for a huge variety of things. I just want to see it used.
“I want people to enjoy the property here. We have 160 acres of land and it’s so gorgeous and beautiful and people who come to the festival never want to leave, so we just thought it would be the perfect place for a creative space.”
So far, the Earthship has its base, built from hundreds of recycled tires filled with dirt, and the second-storey is framed, with the roof in place.
“Now we need straw bale walls on the top floor,” said Gustafson, who herself lives in a straw bale home on the property, “and we need windows and then finishings and some systems put in.”
Those systems include a rainwater catchment system that will recycle water, solar panels and a composting toilet.
“It will be totally off-grid, but we still need to do all those things.”
Construction of the space has all been done by volunteers, including a few members of the Earthship Biotecture Academy who attended the festival in 2014.
“Builders that do strictly Earthship building read about us starting this project and they showed up a couple weeks before the festival and they kind of took over the project with volunteers, and then we had people that stayed on after the festival and worked on it until the snow fell, until they got the roof on.”
Those builders have committed to coming back for the festival again this year to not only enjoy the music, but to continue with construction.
Gustafson said that’s the major motivation for the Kickstarter campain, ensuring that while the experts are there to help, there’s funding to keep the project moving.
Once completed, the Earthship will have three rooms on the first floor, with a kitchen, bunks and one private room with a double bed. Upstairs there will be a large common room that, when not being used for workshops or retreats, will just be a living room space, with cozy furniture.
Outside there will also be a greenhouse, where vegetables can be grown year round.
The dream is that one day there will also be a large patio, possibly with a wood-fired hot tub.
To sponsor the Robson Valley Music Society’s project, visit www.kickstarter.com and search “Dunster Earthship”.
Nicole Veerman
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