Casual Hands rostered me on six Vivid Sydney shifts in 2026. On four of them I was the Team Leader, which sounds grander than it is. In practice it means you are the person holding the clipboard when 8 to 16 volunteers arrive, most of whom you have never met, and the person who has to explain why the break schedule just changed.
The first lesson came quickly: the plan you write at 5 pm is not the plan at 8 pm. Crowds at Circular Quay do not arrive evenly. They surge when a ferry docks and thin out between light shows. So instead of fixed posts, I kept a rough map in my head of where people were standing and moved volunteers between posts as the flow shifted. Breaks worked the same way. Everyone got theirs, but not always at the time written on the sheet.
Rainy nights were the real test. Nobody wants to stand under a dripping awning telling people where the toilets are. What worked was small and unglamorous: rotating the wettest posts more often, keeping the team talking on the radio so nobody felt stranded, and being visibly out there in the rain myself rather than under cover.
Then there were the two radio calls. The first was a man who had lost his wife in the crowd. She was new to Sydney, did not know the area, and her phone had died. We walked the likely route together, checked the ferry wharves, and found her near the information kiosk. The second was a lost child. That one had my heart going. We locked down the exits of our zone, described the child over the radio, and within a few minutes the kids’ area nearby confirmed they had a very calm five-year-old who had simply wandered towards the lights.
Vivid was the first of three events that season. By the end of August, after City2Surf and Ferragosto, I had logged 108 volunteer hours, all recorded through CDU’s VALue program. The certificate is nice. The thing I actually keep is the habit of planning for the plan to change.