so thinking about Greenbelt 2015
Then l came across several Questions among interesting article
This in some way tries to explain the issues about buying this year tickets
For what is a very unique valuable creative faith based and spiritual uplifting
1.The return to a greenfield site after 15 years proved more expensive than we’d budgeted for. At the same time, slightly more of our audience than anticipated didn’t move to Boughton with us.
2. We had to dip into our reserves.
3. We had to use up our reserves.
4. We had to find some more funds after using up our reserves.
5. Thanks to some generous festival supporters, our wonderful band of Angels, and one benefactor in particular (match-funding all donations), we’ve raised close to £100,000.
6. In the past we’ve asked for short term loans to bridge periodic cash-flow crises, repaying them over time, carrying our debts forward. This time we wanted to clear our debts in one fell swoop.
But all this was a wake-up call, and staff and trustees were faced with some serious questions.
Here are some of the serious questions we were faced with.
1. After growing in size from 2000 to 2009, why, since then, has our audience been falling, each year by a few hundred people?
2.Having made small surpluses most years since 2001 on the hard-standing site at Cheltenham (hence those reserves we used up), did our losses in 2014 mean it was time to go back to a site with buildings and roads, with plumbing and plugholes?
3.In the absence of a major corporate partner (a brewery, for example, like other summer festivals which have not gone bust) is it even possible to build an open-air festival on a greenfield site for a relatively niche audience … and still be sustainable?
4. Is there a big enough audience in the UK for a progressive festival of arts, faith and justice? Do the wider demographics of religious institutions suggest Greenbelt’s audience is disappearing? Or is a Festival like this now more necessary than ever?
5. Is Greenbelt still needed? (10,500 people who bought tickets in 2014 think so… but are they enough?)
6. At the festival itself, do we try to do too many things? Too many venues, too much programming… trying to engage too many audiences?
7. We love the young people who attend the Festival but there’s not enough of them so how can Greenbelt become more their thing again?
8. Why are we still investing in a huge open air mainstage, with all the attendant infrastructure, when by the evening of the festival day most people instead seem to be in The Canopy, The Tiny Tea Tent, The Playhouse, The Big Top, The Jesus Arms, singing campsongs around the fire … or back at the tent with their mates?
9. And what about our organisation, especially the volunteers who breathe life into the festival every summer? How do we get new volunteers involved, and how might they shape the festival?
so prayer needed and reflecting back; got to ask has the young not attending!
Why you would then make provision and target them?
Why not work more with those age groups already enjoying and attending,
as an example so can the middle aged range be more encouraged.
Church groups can they be more welcomed, greater working targetting?
Further are you losing those older,camping hard on the knees?
So can you cater better for them?
Why would you target the youths -who do not attend..Yet not put effort into those already attending...
But for myself why is it predominately white..Good white folk despite the issues why does it remain mainly white..
Now this sounds like a critic but it an honest thought process.
1984 unti..2015?
Also do some of the issues isolate the festival,like support for Palestine community...GL and transgender communities
