Congratulations to regional circus trainer, Rachel Peters, on receiving TNA’s Access & Equity Bursary to attend the Trainer Development Program at Canberra Circus Festival. 

Rachel Peters has been doing circus for 11 years and started out with a passion in social circus projects from her beginnings at a community circus in the UK. She has travelled to Nicaragua with Performers Without Borders on a 3-month social circus project, and has performed and worked with several other charity organisations whilst travelling internationally. Rachel started Roundabout Circus in 2017 with her husband Andy, because there was not a circus in their regional area of the Central Coast, and they wanted to share their passion of empowerment that circus can bring to others. Rachel will give any circus discipline a go and her favourite apparatuses are trapeze, hula hoops and people (aka acro).

TNA is thrilled to be able to support Rachel to undertake five days of professional development with her peers later this month, including theory workshops and practical skills sessions delivered by expert circus trainers from across Australia.

“I am really excited to go to Canberra Circus Festival and meet other trainers from community circuses and learn from those with more experience who I have been respecting from afar for several years. Being [in] a regional area we do not have access to many experienced social circus trainers, and I have been doing my best to create a community and build a circus scene in our region from the ground up, with the limited resources that we have. As the CEO of Roundabout, who is still very much on the gym floor teaching, I am looking forward to having access to resources that I can bring back and share with our other trainers to improve our curriculum and teaching practices.”

This bursary was open to circus trainers who identified as a member of a group (or groups) facing significant barriers of access and equity. Eligible applications were placed into a lottery and the recipient was selected at random.

Read TNA’s Equity Action Plan to learn about how we are embedding change within all areas of our work to make our sector fairer for under-represented groups including First Nations people, Deaf and disabled people, People of Colour and regional people.