Our story
Inspired by bioregional principles, the two lead co-facilitators (both ‘climate and nature leads’ for their respective parish councils, Freshford and Winsley) are facilitating a collaboration of around 12 parish councils and their communities along the Bristol River Avon, between and including Bradford on Avon Town and Batheaston. This group is organising a grassroots River Festival, called the Wild Waters Festival, to be held in June (2025), to celebrate the river and its local communities. Our aim is to draw attention to the pressures on the river due to climate change and biodiversity loss, and to encourage local people to take positive action to help.
Our advice
- Our steering group has met three times. Participants include town/parish councillors and representatives from local nature groups.Each town or parish council involved has agreed to host a minimum of three community events during the festival (31/5/25 to 15/6/25 inclusive).
- Events are to be on a ‘river’ theme, with a climate and/or nature focus, seeking to engage local people in the issues and to enable them to take positive action in response.
- We have suggested that each parish approach their church, school and local nature organisations to host events as a starting point, but a wide range of other community groups will likely be involved, from film clubs to pubs, boat clubs to local charities.
- We take a deliberately grassroots community-led approach, in the expectation that the events that will be developed by each community are relevant to each community.
- We have asked organisers to aim for a wide range of event types and target audiences, and to make the events as accessible as possible.
- Our festival dates have been chosen to coincide with the Great Big Green week and to run in parallel with B&NES’ planned river festival in Bath (with support from the BANES team).
- We have a festival name: the ‘Wild Waters Festival’ and a website which will be further developed as we move towards June, to list all events: https://wildwatersfestival.com/
- Given the grassroots nature of the festival, exactly what events will be provided cannot be known precisely yet. However, to give some examples, in Winsley we are intending to screen a film about rivers in the local church, to host a talk on ‘bats and rivers’ at the local retirement village and to carry out river quality testing with the local primary school.
Our metrics
- The number, form, type, content and location of festival events that take place.
- Attendance numbers at each festival event.
- A ‘mapping’ of connections made throughout the planning phase of the festival and during the festival itself. The relevant information will be gathered at a post festival workshop for local organisers.
There will hopefully be a research report available as well from a MA researcher. She is a member of our group and has chosen our project as the subject of her research for her MA in Environmental Humanities with Bath Spa University. She is planning to follow the organising of our festival as an example of ‘micro-bioregioning’ in practice.
