Beltane Fire Society has been awarded £500 from the Climate Challenge Fund

Beltane Fire Society has been awarded £500 from the Climate Challenge Fund, part of Keep Scotland Beautiful, to explore creating a ‘Green’ Fire Festival.

The charity’s board applied to the Climate Challenge Fund for a small development grant of £500 to assist in hosting conversations with its volunteers to find ways to reduce the environmental impact of hosting the festivals. The idea came about after the recent environmental focus at the Beltane Fire Festival 2019*.

As a result of the successful application, Beltane Fire Society will host several conversations with its volunteers to understand what action they would like to see the charity take and how it can better support volunteers to be more environmentally friendly in their activities. The conversations will encompass what volunteers can do individually, what they can do when involved in their festival groups, and then finally how Beltane Fire Society can do more from an organisational standpoint.

Volunteers make up a vital part of the festivals, with almost 300 involved every time. The board is very pleased that this funding will enable Beltane to include their voices to help shape the charity and ensure it creates a community the volunteers are proud to be part of.

Although aimed at the charity’s volunteers, the meetings will be open to members of the public to share ideas. Beltane wants to generate ideas with locals to ensure everyone can enjoy the activities that take place in their city.

More information about the discussion events coming soon, so please keep an eye out if you are interested in taking part of the conversation of creating a ‘Green’ Fire Festival in the run up to Samhuinn Fire Festival 2019, which will take place on 31st October on Calton Hill.

*This year at the Beltane Fire Festival 2019, the volunteer who held the role of May Queen, a key character on the night that represents part of the Triple Goddess at the festival, had chosen to take a more environmental approach with the role they played on the night. This was done to highlight the damage that is happening to the Earth every day and got quite a bit of media attention as other environmental groups were being very vocal around the UK as well. Read more on the specific issues that were discussed in April can be found here.

The post Beltane Fire Society receives funding to explore a ‘Green’ Fire Festival appeared first on Creative Carbon Scotland.

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Creative Carbon Scotland is a partnership of arts organisations working to put culture at the heart of a sustainable Scotland. We believe cultural and creative organisations have a significant influencing power to help shape a sustainable Scotland for the 21st century.

In 2011 we worked with partners Festivals Edinburgh, the Federation of Scottish Threatre and Scottish Contemporary Art Network to support over thirty arts organisations to operate more sustainably.

We are now building on these achievements and working with over 70 cultural organisations across Scotland in various key areas including carbon management, behavioural change and advocacy for sustainable practice in the arts.

Our work with cultural organisations is the first step towards a wider change. Cultural organisations can influence public behaviour and attitudes about climate change through:

Changing their own behaviour;
Communicating with their audiences;
Engaging the public’s emotions, values and ideas.

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