4.10.26 17:00

Dear everyone,

our goal with this statement is to clarify our position and responsibilities regarding the reported off-venue incident, the open letter and the group discussions around it. We have spent a lot of time reading, talking and reflecting on what has been shared. We have heard anger and disappointment, as well as care, trust and hope. We want to honor and thank you for sharing your thoughts and ideas with us and with each other.

The people behind this statement

The Parallel Universe core team consists of five human beings who each bring different experiences, perspectives, relationships, schedules and trauma histories into this process. 

We know a team statement can easily sound like one clear and unified voice. But we have not always understood everything in the same way or agreed on what the right response should be. Behind each text are five different people who have been doing their best trying to find a responsible way through a difficult and painful situation. We ask you to consider that when you continue reading.

What already exists

The Parallel Universe has existed for seven years. It is a project that was born out of passion and a need for sober, s+ daytime spaces. Throughout these years, an enormous amount of care, reflection and labor (most of it unpaid) has gone into developing and creating spaces centered around consent, awareness, and mutual care. 

We have participated in trainings, are deeply engaged with consent, awareness, trauma-informed practice and conflict support, and have continuously tried to implement these principles within our organisational structures and spaces. In the last years we have developed detailed policies, procedures and guidelines describing how we approach consent, how concerns and issues can be reported, how we support affected people, and how we respond when incidents happen during our events. We did this to give clarity and offer better support to our participants, as well as support us as a team – so we don’t have to figure out everything from scratch with each incident, while still acknowledging that each case is unique. 

The existing structures did not equip us well enough for handling this off-site incident and the complexity of the process that followed. At the same time, we want to acknowledge the years of work that went into building and improving them. We believe we would have been even less equipped to navigate this situation without that foundation. Both can be true: the structures have been valuable, and they need to be adapted in the future.

Our existing Policy and Procedure can be read here: www.theparalleluniverse.org/policy 

Why the Emotional Support Team was not informed beforehand

We have heard the concern that the Emotional Support Team and volunteers were not informed about the ongoing case beforehand. At the Parallel Universe, we do not have an awareness team responsible for investigating reports or managing ongoing cases. Our Emotional Support Team serves as a first-responder and resource for participants who need immediate emotional support during an event. Ongoing cases and decisions about case documentation, access and community safety are handled confidentially by the core team and the Consent Committee, who are familiar with the relevant procedures.

The reported person was already excluded before the last planned Parallel Universe would have taken place and therefore wouldn’t have been able to attend the event. The affected person was also not expected to be present. We therefore did not anticipate that the case would require an on-site response or directly affect the roles of the Emotional Support Team or volunteers.

Where the process is at now

Regarding the reported incident, we (the core team) reviewed the available documents and, within ten days of receiving the report, decided to exclude the reported person from our events following the wishes of the affected person. Because of our personal relationships with the reported person, we then referred the task of conducting an assessment and developing measures concerning accountability and any possible future access of the reported person to the Consent Committee (more info on the CC in our Policy&Procedures). 

Within nine days of receiving the report, a member of the core team had a call with the affected person and one person from their support circle to clarify questions about our procedures. This team member also recommended Frauen- und Mädchenberatung as a free and independent counselling service, which the affected person consulted with and ended up recommending in their open letter. We complied with their wish of nominating one designated contact person from our team and later adapted the timing and frequency of our communication to their stated needs. When the affected person communicated that our handling of the process had caused them more hurt, we offered a budget of up to €200 for professional support. We also offered possible ways of making our spaces more accessible for the affected person. These offers have not been taken up so far. 

The reported person is currently still excluded, and any reconsideration of their participation depends on the accountability process monitored and assessed by the Consent Committee.

The affected person’s access will be prioritised for at least two years, should the reported person ever be considered for participation again. After this two-year period, we will support arrangements that minimise the possibility of unwanted encounters. This applies to the Parallel Universe Festival, Loslassen Events and the Golden Ape Studio. 

Our approach reflects principles of Transformative Justice (TJ), a community-based approach that centres safety, healing, accountability, repair, as well as consequences and the prevention of future harm rather than punishment and exclusion. We have gathered a selection of resources about working with consent incidents on a community level (see below).

How we see our role 

We want to name an important distinction that has become more clear to us during our counseling sessions: supporting an affected person and making organisational decisions are not the same task.

A support group can centre entirely on a person’s experience and what they need. It can work on the basis of the person’s own power of definition (Definitionsmacht) and taking their side (Parteilichkeit), because it’s only there for the person it supports.

As an organisation, we have to decide what we can responsibly determine based on the information available to us, what is relevant to access and community safety, and what boundaries or measures are appropriate. This also means recognising what we cannot determine and what falls outside our role. 

We can take the affected person’s experience and the impact on them seriously while also recognising our limitations as an organization. We are not a legal or investigative authority, and we don’t want to act like one.

Our accountability in this process

Accountability, for us, means acknowledging concrete actions and their impact, taking responsibility where responsibility can honestly be taken, participating in processes of reflection and change, accepting boundaries and consequences, and working to reduce the risk of future harm. We understand accountability as something beyond the binary that does not require unanimous agreement.

Being accountable for something does not require everyone involved to share the same interpretation of events, nor does disagreement automatically mean an absence of accountability. We believe it is possible to acknowledge harm and impact while still holding different perspectives on parts of what happened.

We have been publicly criticized for our handling of this process and recognise our actions and communication caused additional distress and contributed to a loss of trust. This process and the discussion around it has been painful and overwhelming for the affected person, the community and us. We are sorry for the ways in which our handling of it added to that pain.

We take responsibility for what was ours: slow and unclear communication, the absence of a sufficiently transparent timeline, gaps in our procedures and moments in which our communication created further distress and loss of trust. We cannot, however, be responsible for the outcome of another person’s healing process or mediating the underlying interpersonal conflict on their behalf. 

We want to mention one more time that our role as an organisation is to respond to reported incidents, make decisions about access and safety, communicate those decisions to the people directly involved, and review them when relevant new information or developments in the accountability process arise. We also take responsibility for not holding our own organisational boundaries consistently. We had clearly communicated the limits of our role and our decision of passing the assessment of the case to the Consent Committee, because we could not responsibly make those determinations ourselves. 

If we host another Parallel Universe Festival, we will update our consent policy and procedures in collaboration with the Consent Committee to address:

• consent incidents that happen outside our events, but affect access to our spaces
• clearer responsibilities, timelines, boundaries, consequences, and communication structures 
• informational resources for the affected parties and the support pods

Our relationship with the community

We have heard from people who felt safe, welcomed, cared for and able to explore connections at the Parallel Universe in ways they could not elsewhere. We have also heard from people who are angry, disappointed and whose trust in us has been damaged. Both responses – and all the in-between-ones – matter to us.

We all share responsibility for how we engage with conflict, especially when being activated. Reacting without reflection or treating assumptions as established facts can cause further harm and make an already difficult process more polarised.

The values we build our spaces around do not only matter in moments of connection, exploration and celebration. They matter just as much, if not more, when things become difficult. 

If we want a community rooted in care and consent, all of us need to put that care, awareness and work into how we treat one another – especially when we are angry, disappointed, upset, or working with different and necessarily incomplete information. Holding complexity, staying curious and respecting each other’s boundaries are part of that work too.

Where we draw the line

This is our final public team statement on this topic. We will not enter into a point-by-point discussion and we will not respond to additional interpretations or criticisms. We will not engage with communication that uses threats, intimidation or coercion. From now on, we will refer back to this statement. If our response does not meet what you as a reader need from an organisation, we understand if you decide not to join our events in the future. We do remain open to broader feedback about our policies and organisational practices.

We believe that care, consent and respect for boundaries remain important for everyone involved, including during conflict. We wholeheartedly encourage conversations on these topics. As individuals, and depending on our capacity, some of us may remain part of them – but not as representatives of the Parallel Universe core team.

While our public involvement in this process ends here, private conversations, the accountability work and our learning will continue. We remain committed to creating spaces rooted in consent, care and accountability. We will carry forward what we have learned, make the changes that fall within our responsibility and remain clear about the boundaries of what we can offer. This statement concludes our public engagement with this case. 

The Parallel Universe Team
Lian, Marek, Ren, Valerie & Janina

Note: Separate processes are not addressed in this statement. We are taking responsibility for it in direct communication and will not discuss it publicly at this time.

Resources: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1wX4TQm7AEtkWSCme2linZmbPBb912EycNWxOX3IEpEk/edit?usp=sharing 

11.9.26 13:00

The festival has been cancelled. The venue has been cancelled as well and is not available as a meeting place.

10.9.26 14:00

Dear Readers,

We have taken time this morning as a team to talk about the open letter that was published yesterday and the concerns and questions it has raised. We take what has been shared seriously. At the same time, we cannot and do not want to respond to a seven-month process in its full complexity one day before a three-day festival. There are things in the letter that we acknowledge and have already taken responsibility for, and there are also conclusions and assessments that we see differently.  

To clarify for those who haven’t read the full letter from the affected person: The incident did not take place at one of our events. The reported person is excluded from our events, and the case is being assessed by a more independent body (our Consent Committee – more info see below). We have prioritized the attendance of the affected person at Parallel Universe Festival, Loslassen events and the Golden Ape Studio for at least two years, provided that the reported person is ever allowed to participate again, and we are committed to find a long-term solution to ensure the affected person’s safety.

We want to stress that our statement is written with activated nervous systems and under high time pressure. What we can say clearly right now is that our handling of this process has not always lived up to the standards we want for ourselves: At times, our communication was too slow and unclear, and we did not ask enough questions about what the person in question needed from us in order to feel supported and safer within the community in the long term. We have acknowledged and apologised for this.

Responsibility for the process

Asking the affected person to help define parts of the framework for the accountability process came from the intention to include the affected person and their needs in the decision-making. We understand that this instead placed an additional burden on them. We have acknowledged and apologised for this as well.

At the same time, part of the process necessarily focused on the reported person because we need to assess their potential risk to our spaces, what accountability would require, and what measures were needed to prevent further harm. We don’t believe that doing this was in itself a prioritisation of the reported person or their potential return. Where we fell short was in not checking in if the affected person has a support network. We continue to take responsibility for that.

Existing procedures and the role of the Consent Committee

We want to clarify what procedures were already in place when the report reached us: While our existing policy was clearly not sufficient to guide us through all complexities and aspects of what followed, there is a procedure specifically addressing reports involving people in positions of responsibility within our community, as well as a policy for situations where personal relationships could create bias. You can read our policy & procedures here.

This was also why we involved the Consent Committee (CC) – an independent group of people not involved with the daily operations of the festival – within the first week after receiving the initial request from the affected person. Our policy states that decision-making should not be carried out by people who are friends or partners of those involved, in order to ensure as much impartiality and fairness as possible. In this case, members of our core team have personal relationships of varying degrees of closeness with the reported person, which is why we felt it was important not to evaluate the case and make decisions about it exclusively within our own team.

We understand that involving the CC can be interpreted as us stepping away from our responsibility or not having a clear stance. From our perspective, however, involving a more independent body and waiting for their assessment was part of following the procedure we had in place and taking the potential for our own bias and power position seriously. 

Our response to the racism-related incident last September

As another, racism-related incident connected to last year’s festival was brought up, we want to briefly address this as well: In the run-up to and during the last event, we communicated poorly and made mistakes in how we set up and communicated a collaboration. Under pressure, we also failed to respond with the empathy and care that was needed. These mistakes contributed to racist experiences for a person close to us, and we took and take responsibility for that.

As a consequence, we decided to postpone our following festival from May to September and worked with a BIPoC-led anti-racism consultancy over the course of six months, alongside the work we were doing around the consent-related case. We apologised to the affected person and covered therapeutic and bodywork support. Further repair will continue according to their wishes and remains an ongoing process.

We have also made structural changes as a result. We now use written contributor agreements that clarify roles, expectations, workload and compensation or exchange in advance, and we have restructured parts of our internal communication and responsibilities.

We don’t share this to suggest that this process is finished or that we handled everything correctly. We share it because it was brought into this conversation and because we want to be transparent about what happened afterwards and what concrete changes we have made in response.

Next steps

Over the next three days, we will be holding space for around 110 people, together with our volunteers and facilitators. We take the responsibility that comes with that very seriously. Since the open letter was published, we have also been directly receiving many messages, questions and reactions. We want to hear them, but we want to be transparent that we currently don’t have the capacity to respond individually to all of them while preparing and holding the festival. We therefore ask you not to interpret a delayed response as us ignoring what is being raised.

To make sure questions and concerns don’t get lost, we created a separate space for this conversation where they can be collected: https://t.me/+mYX0jHZeaQ1jYWU0. We will read what is shared there on Tuesday 15.9.26, even if we cannot respond to everything immediately.

This space is intended for questions, concerns and feedback directed towards us as an organisation. We ask everyone to respect the privacy of the people involved and not use this space to speculate about or discuss the affected person, the reported person or details of the underlying incident.

For our facilitators and volunteers, we are offering a call before the festival where there is space for questions, concerns and uncertainty. And if someone no longer feels comfortable participating or volunteering after what has been shared, we completely respect that (please write us an email asap).

During the festival itself, we want to find a balance between making space for this conversation and allowing people to participate in the festival without making this situation a central topic throughout the weekend. We know that some people will want and need to talk about what has been raised, while others may not want to engage with it during the festival at all.

For those who do want to talk about it, we will offer a dedicated space on Saturday, 10:30-12:00. Members of the core team will be there to listen, hear concerns and answer questions to the extent that we responsibly can while respecting confidentiality. Participation is completely optional.

Outside of this space, participants are of course still welcome to approach the Core Team if they have questions or concerns. At the same time, we don’t want to proactively bring people into this process if they don’t want to be part of it.

After the festival, we will take the time to engage more fully with what has been raised.

Going forward

Some questions about our own responsibility and the impact of our actions are not settled within our team. We don’t want to answer those questions defensively, but want to take the time to carefully reflect on conclusions and terminology before publicly adopting them. And we don’t think that work belongs only to a single organizing team or a Consent Committee. 

There are broader questions here about what communities need to have in place before harm happens, what affected people should be able to expect from community organisers, and how accountability can be held without placing the responsibility for designing it on the person who was harmed. We are ready to be part of that conversation – we just don’t believe it can be held responsibly in its full complexity in the 24 hours before opening the doors to 110 people. 

We will contact external professionals (still tbd – recommendations welcome) within one week after the festival to assess how we handled this process, where our responsibilities and boundaries lie, and what needs to change structurally as a consequence. We think that this is the responsible thing for us to do at this point. 

For the coming festival, our focus is on creating as much safety, care and openness as possible for everyone who is there. 

Thank you for your understanding,

Lian, Marek, Ren, Valerie & Janina

The Parallel Universe Team