What is the London Festival of Ideas?
Learn more about the aims of the Festival and the Building Strong Communities Mission.
The Festival
The Festival of Ideas was a partnership engagement initiative, creating the space for London’s Communities to explore what strong communities look like, where they come together and what’s needed for recovery. The insights from the Festival will be used to inform the next steps of the Building Strong Communities Mission.
The festival invited everyone to come together, joining up activity taking place across the capital which demonstrated and celebrated what strong communities look like. It bought together London’s community and faith organisations, its activists and artists, its social businesses and civic universities, as well as the individuals and networks exploring new ways of caring for each other and the world around them
The Festival of Ideas saw 104 events take place from June 28 -July 23 2021, and engaged nearly 5000 Londoners. Event activity included creative workshops, mural painting, gardening activities, community lunches and music recitals. All events explored what strong communities mean to participants in several ways including conversations, crafting, post-it walls and via the festival poster competition.
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Festival of Ideas infographic
The Festival
- 104 Events took place across London boroughs
- 56 Events supported with grants from Mayor and City Bridge Trust
- Almost 4500 Londoners took part in festival events
Talk London
- Over 1000 responses to Talk London between 24 May - 23 July
- 6,461 Unique Views of the Talk London BSC Discussion threads
London.gov.uk
- On the best performing days the webpages had more than 3,000 views
Social Media
- Festival communications received half a million views and 31,000 clicks
- #FestivalofIdeasLDN used 230 times on twitter and 110 times on instagram
#FestivalofIdeasLDN
Insights from the Festival
Across all this activity, event hosts and participants were invited to reflect on and answer the festivals three key questions:
- When you imagine strong communities, what do you see?
- Where and how do communities come together?
- What is needed to build strong communities?
These were responded to through insight forms, Talk London discussions, poster competitions and creative outputs. In October, two insight workshops took place with event hosts, to explore these responses and identify key themes coming out of the festival.
You can explore the insights from the Festival throughout these pages. This includes:
- The Festival of Ideas Zine, created by Mia Maxwell of Femzine
- The key insights from all the conversations that took place, co-analysed by event hosts, Superhighways and data analyst Nissa Ramsay
- The Festival of Ideas poster competition winners
- An Interactive Exhibition created for the closing of the festival, hosted on miro. Password is community
The Building Strong Communities mission team will be using these insights to design the next steps of the mission. Check back here for an update soon.
Festival organisers
The festival is a partnership between Consortium, City Bridge Trust, Greater London Authority, King's College London, Locality, Local Trust, London Boroughs Faiths Network, London Councils, London Funders, London Plus, Toynbee Hall, The Ubele Initiative.
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