Winscombe Community Festival of Arts and Nature

Aim: A free festival for people of all ages in winscombe and the surrounding villages, celebrating community, creativity and each other

We are planning an exciting pilot this year, of a Bi-annual, intergenerational community festival of Arts, Culture and Sustainability in Winscombe, North Somerset. 

Your pledge will help us bring exciting and vibrant activities and performances to the community of Winscombe and surrounds this year AND in the years to come. We will be celebrating the locale, and forming and strengthening intergenerational relationships, through song, visual arts, theatre and food.

This year we are programming a series of festival arts workshops and a pop-up choir in the run up to the festival. There will be workshops in masks, carnival costume and decor, all run from a local home for the elderly, Winscombe Hall, Winscombe Community Centre and Winscombe Scout hut. We want to bring people of all ages together to create, make friends and have fun! We will also be delivering this workshop series to 2 refugee homes, a local Art Club for primary aged children, local schools, a nursery, and a mother and baby group.

On the day there will be FREE environmental arts and crafts to have a go at, like seasonal wreath and crown making, bug hotels, stick bread and herb-hair-heads to get families learning about sustainability and local worldlife, as well as learning to grow and cook their own food! 

There will be a fancy dress parade for families to join, performances from local choirs all topped off by a FREE village feast, served from our community kitchen at Winscombe Community Centre. We might even have some dancing!

In the future, we would like to invite local professional theatre companies, local musical talent and local food businesses to come together to celebrate the talents of the region and make Winscombe a destination for arts, culture and community spirit.

Without your support we can't make this festival the amazing vibrant thing we know it ca be. Your donation will invest in this years festival AND the festivals future, and enable us to prove to funders that there is a need to invest in events like these that bring people together in rural settings, to create, celebrate and build community.

We have been unsuccessful in getting funding from The Arts Council, and although we have funding from Quartet, The Mendip Society,and  Alive Activities to run the workshops and pop-up choir, we still need funds to pay for the festival day itself!

The festival will be an exciting programme of:

• Pop-up choir rehearsals at Winscombe Hall care home

• Classes in crafts, creating costumes, puppets & masks, at Winscombe Hall care home, & 4 more classes in 2 local refugee accommodations, supported by Trigger

• 6 classes in parade puppet making in Winscombe and Sandford Primary Schools, Rainbows nursery & at our Art Club

• A community parade

• Performances by our pop-up choir & invited local choirs

• Local Wildlife charities invited to install stands about their work

• Environmental arts workshops on the day in seasonal wreath and crown making, Insect Hotels, Herb-Hair-Heads and Stick Bread

•  A Village Feast, served from our community kitchen, hosted by Winscombe Community Centre

Intergenerational work seeks to create a wider understanding of one another through connections, friendships, learning and research. Connections between the generations have been proven to reduce loneliness in older people, evoke feelings of joy and happiness, and uproot stigmas caused by ageism. 

Melissa Pollard - Alive Activities

Funding method

Keep what you raise – this project will receive all pledges made by 20th July 2025 at 6:00pm