Funded: £46,757
Campaign: Securing the future of Towersey Festival
Towersey Festival is a totally independent festival and the oldest in the country. It is still family run and not for profit. When it does make a profit, they put it back into the Festival and support artists and local organisations.
They save funds when they can for a rainy day, but had to postpone their 2020 event to 2021 as a result of Covid-19. Wiping out an entire year is not something they could ever be ready for, and they needed to call on the support of their community to ‘imagine another lovelier world’ and get them safely through to 2021.
Since funding:
The festival successfully raised well past their original £25,000 target, and celebrated with a Home Made Towersey online/at-home event. They’re now cautiously planning for a 2021 festival.
But that’s not all! The Towersey team also ran a second crowdfunding campaign, using everything they’d learned from their first. Celebrating the life of Roy Bailey, they raised funds to produce a very special live album from 2019 festival recordings.
Funded: £15,015
“Roy Bailey was a campaigner, a storyteller, a performer, an artist, a man of principle and peace, and a genius of his craft. Instrumental in the founding of Towersey Festival, he was also a long-standing regular festival performer and much-loved patron.
“We wanted to come together as a festival – and a wider music scene – to celebrate his life and legacy with a tribute concert in 2019, Roy Bailey: Remembered. The concert was something truly special, and included some of the giants of today’s folk scene as well as appearances from Roy’s own family and friends.
“We recorded this very special event with a separate audio feed. At first we thought we might just be recording it for festival archives, but it turned out to be an exceptional quality recording. With the blessing of everyone involved, we’ve decided to mix and produce a live album of the concert, in tribute to Roy’s extraordinary legacy”