Stainsby 2020 Newsflash

Let’s get the Bad News out of the way first...

Not surprisingly, you can’t run a festival with six people from two households standing 2 metres apart. We‘ve assessed all the risks and there’s no way we could run (or afford) a safe festival in its usual form – not even if government rules were relaxed (or our name was Dominic Cummings). Sadly, this year’s Stainsby Festival, in the form you’ve grown to love it, won’t be happening (not even in Durham).

We’ll see you back on the festival field again in 2021.

 

But all is not lost… if you’ve bought a ticket already, you’ll shortly get an email where you can:

• Roll it over to next year at the same price…
• Get a refund if you need to, or…
• If you can afford to - donate the money to our fields fund - and huge thanks to those of you who already have!

You can read the big news about the fields further down.

 

Now, here’s the Good News

We’re a charity (as we never tire of saying!) whose key purpose is to support music performance, especially folk. So, we’re going to support this year’s artists by inviting them to do something specifically for the Stainsby audience, which means you’ll also get to see and hear some of them over the weekend – just not on the field. In a spirit of cooperation, along with other Stainsby regulars, we’re hoping to put all this together into a show with contributions from the whole festival family.

This is a big undertaking for a small (but perfectly formed!) volunteer event like ours and it can never replace the experience of us all being together on the festival field. Still, we hope to be able to create something that captures just a little of the usual Stainsby magic. Something that helps us all go the distance until we can gather on the fields again. The aim is to have the link to this go live on our website on Festival Saturday July 18th. (tbc!)

We’d love you to join us. Together - but socially distanced

 

And now, the BIG NEWS...

We now have a target date for our fields appeal! Our patron has given notice that he intends to sell the festival fields and is giving us first refusal, as promised. We have two years to raise the necessary funds, so we are re-launching our appeal. We’ve still to agree a final valuation but a figure around the £55,000 mark is our current fund-raising target. Thanks to previous generosity on the part of festival supporters, we’re already 40% of the way there. It’s not the best of economic times to be re-launching the appeal but together we can do this and take control of the festival’s destiny for future generations. Now that’s something to aim for!

If you'd like to support us, go to our Appeals page to make a donation. Better still if you gift aid us we can claim an extra 25p from HMRC for every £1 you give us! Please, please help to secure a bright new future for your favourite festival. A future that for once would be entirely in our own hands.

Stay Safe. Stay Well. Stay Cool.

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