The Big Green Fringe Festival aimed to strengthen connections between communities and their green surroundings, to encourage use of green spaces and to increase footfall via sustainable travel, through actively promoting rail, bus, walk and cycle routes.
The festival aimed to:
alongside fostering shared ownership, respect and pride of local green spaces.
The festival was originally planned to have 14 creative and active events; due to widespread enthusiasm for the event, this number grew and the festival resulted in holding atotal of 42 events over two weeks.
The festival:
Overall, the festival successfully combined environmental awareness, community engagement, wellbeing, and accessible learning, leaving both immediate and lasting benefits for participants and the local area
One of the project’s greatest successes was delivering a full programme of diverse, high-quality events every day of the festival.
Organising a festival of this scale highlighted the significant time and coordination required. As this was the first experience of delivering an event of this nature, the amount of planning was underestimated. At times, the speed of the delivery process meant the wider planning team struggled to keep up with decision-making and implementation.
For future festivals, planning will begin much earlier, with a larger and more clearly defined planning team in place from the outset. This will allow more time for collaborative decision-making, clearer allocation of responsibilities, and a more manageable workload, ultimately strengthening the delivery of the festival while building on the success of this inaugural event.
