Brussels By Night Care Teams
Since 2023, Brussels By Night has a mobile Care Team. The Care Team is a team of paid volunteers responsible for intervening at events to ensure the comfort and well-being of patrons.
In practice, the Care Team works to prevent violent and oppressive behavior and responds to it as needed during recurring missions at partner establishments and events. The members of the team circulate among the crowd, serve as a point of contact and listen to people in need, keep records of any interventions, etc., in order to promote a sense of security among partygoers.
Our Contribution
2023: Recruiting and training
We created the Care Team as such by meeting and recruiting its members. We ended up recruiting 25 people, all with varied profiles, in order to achieve the greatest possible diversity within our team and trained them in collaboration with the Osmose collective.
Due to the challenging working conditions, the team’s size had varied significantly, and each year we recruited new volunteers to compensate, enabling us to maintain a core team of around 20 people over the years.
2023–2025: Running the Care Team
BBN provided direct support during events to prevent and manage incidents in real time. In 2023, our Care Team worked on 136 events. In 2024, they were active in 86 events, half of which occurred in the municipality of 1000 Brussels. In 2025 we were called in 60 events, as we noticed the care team growing independently in venues and events, and needs changing with more financial vulnerability in venues and event organisers.
After 3 years of working with care teams, we noticed that that interventions are usually distributed as follows : about 60% of interventions are drug-related (fainting, puking, sleeping…), while about 15% of incidents are sexual violence / transgressive behavior-related. The 25% remaining include aggressive behavior, health-related incidents, and other situations (couple fights, stressed or sad people, various comments and demands from the crowd).
2025–2026: New perspectives
In 2026, we made some changes in the way we organize Care Teams. BBN’s goal has been since the beginning to make its members autonomous with Care Teams, and to help them integrate them as early as possible into event conception and prevention strategies around sexual violence and discrimination. Thus, Brussels By Night encourages venues and collectives to create their own Care Team and remains available to provide training and advice.