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00:00I'm Megan Lloyd. I'm a veteran and current caseworker to Damon Hines, the MP for East Hampshire.
00:09I'm here today as one of the organisers of the East Hampshire Veterans Festival,
00:14along with my colleagues in the East Hampshire District Council, Petersville Town Council
00:18and the Petersville branch of the Royal British Legion.
00:22The inaugural East Hampshire Veterans Festival, there's a huge range of organisations here
00:28from small local charities to national support groups, the public sector, the private sector,
00:34all with one thing in common, which is they've got something important that can help or support veterans.
00:40We've also got lots of veterans here and in fact I've just been talking to a couple who've met up
00:44after having not seen each other for a couple of decades, so that's a nice aspect to this as well.
00:50We've got about 35 organisations, both local East Hampshire based organisations and national organisations
00:58who are showcasing themselves to show how they support the veteran community,
01:04mainly geared around East Hampshire, it's the East Hampshire Veterans Festival.
01:10We've had people come in already, people waiting at the door for us, when the door opened they were ready
01:17and waiting to see what was going on. We've had people come as far as South West London,
01:21so people are coming quite far to this festival and it's hoped this can be a framework for other festivals nationally,
01:29other local authorities, RBL branches, we've also got the office of Damien Hines, the local MP,
01:36assisted with the planning, so it's hoped that this can be a framework for other festivals around the country.
01:44We've been planning this for just under a year now, it was the brainchild of Megan Lloyd who's a veteran as well
01:53and it follows on from her experience when she left, much similar to mine when I left.
02:03As soon as we started talking, that's it, it all happened, this is what we want to do, planning, and then we're here.
02:11It's already a success and we're not even at 11am, so this is much bigger and better than I ever could have imagined.
02:22Part of being a district councillor, we did help by grant funding the cost of renting the room,
02:26so the district councillor were involved like that.
02:29We also initially got the idea through the district councillor's armed forces stakeholder group,
02:34where Megan Lloyd, one of the officers who works for Damien Hines, came up with the idea of having a festival
02:39and the idea went from there, so here we are today, thank you to her and thank you to everybody involved.
02:44The idea started mostly to cover off the big hitters as we would call them, so health, employment, Department of Work and Pensions
02:56and our very complicated armed forces pensions.
03:01A year ago, when we first started discussing the Veterans Festival and who would be here, they were a really important core,
03:10but it's grown so much beyond that and we have national and local veteran charities here.
03:17We also have some non-veteran specific charities, social prescribers, counselling services, we've got Hounds for Heroes,
03:25we've got a local military museum and it's just been fantastic to see veterans reigniting old friendships.
03:35We've had reunions and we've had some lovely conversations and it's just been lovely to see veterans of all ages
03:43picking up sort of artefacts from the times that they were serving, so it's just been such fun so far.
03:49Absolutely wonderful to see veterans who haven't seen each other for ages coming together, meeting each other
03:54and everyone knows that there's a real strong bond for those who've served in our armed forces,
04:01but there's that personal bond as well between people who haven't seen one another
04:05and events like this really matter to those veterans who can meet each other, discuss their lives and discuss their service history as well
04:13and I think it's fabulous to see, it's really heartwarming, it's wonderful.
04:16I think we were all up last night thinking, goodness me, what if nobody comes along, but that's absolutely not been the case
04:22and we all said to ourselves this morning, if one veteran comes through the door and gets some help then it's all been worth it,
04:29so I think we can safely say it's been worth it.