Our future is in your hands

Harrogate International Festivals has long been an ambitious organisation with entrepreneurial ideas for our future and a rugged determination to see them through. However, the funding landscape for the arts in the North of England continues to shrink. Whilst our approach of anticipating financial challenges has proved successful, we have no regular annual funding to plan beyond six months ahead and this has an impact on both the scale and reach of our delivery.

In short our ambition is hindered by our resource.

The Festival cannot stand still. We are determined to invest in our strengths of raising aspirations, creating opportunity and nurturing excellence.

Future Access

Creating access to the arts for the widest range of audiences and participants through:

Programmes for those with least access

Keeping prices affordable or free for young people

Building new audiences through new programmes

Increasing audiences through live and digital experiences

Future Work

We will be a Festival that leads, not follows creating exciting new work that:

Takes bold artistic risks

Creates new work and commissions

Allows Guest Curators to fulfil their artistic vision

Develops a body of work to engage the community

Creates new programmes, with an artistic legacy, making a valuable contribution to Harrogate and beyond

Future Bright

We will help transform the lives of disadvantaged children and young people by supporting them to achieve their full potential through engagement in the arts by:

Transforming the opportunities for participation in literature, music and science

Supporting the rising stars of the future

Taking creative risks to develop our future

Creating opportunities to develop talent regardless of background or genre

Future Festival

Philanthropic investment is now critical to the Festival being a sustainable organisation, with the ability to make full use of our artistic and cultural inheritance and create life changing opportunities in the arts.