The Context
Forestside Shopping Centre is a busy shopping centre located in Newtownbreda in Belfast. Home to almost 40 traders, the bustling mall offers food, drink and a wide variety of retail options for its customers.
Sunflowerfest is a three day festival of music and art with camping, set on the magical Tuddy's Farm in Hillsborough, County Down. It is a friendly, all inclusive, broad-minded weekend festival of great music and arts. It aims to nurture the mind, body and soul through a wide range of superb music, both local and international acts, fantastic fun and free activities for the whole family, film, story telling, interactive art, craft and creative workshops.
Forestside has a demonstrable commitment to supporting and nurturing up and coming musical talent. The popular shopping centre is always looking for new ways to extend and build on this work, and a new partnership came along which did just that…
The Solution
Forestside’s partnership with Sunflowerfest started in 2017 after some young artists who had been supported through the Forestside Artist Development programme were successful in their application to play at Sunflowerfest. The strategic fit between Forestside and Sunflowerfest was obvious, given that both placed an emphasis on supporting up-and-coming musicians; Sunflowerfest is one of the few major events in Ireland to provide a platform for local musicians to play with high quality production in front of a large crowd, whilst Forestside is always trying to nurture a new generation of talent and enhance their networks.
Building on 3 years of successful collaboration, supported by funding from Arts & Business NI, the partners developed the concept of Future Festivals. This project was designed to work with young people aged 18-25 and provide opportunities for them to develop core skills in relation to festival production and management within a professional live festival environment. During the next festival, Sunflowerfest will give full control of The Pond Stage and associated areas to a group of aspiring industry professionals across three key elements of festival management and production: Production Management, Programming and Artist Liaison, and Media and Marketing.
The programme will work with around twenty-five young people with six in the programming team, ten in the media team and nine in the production team. Within each element, the young people will be supported by an experienced industry professional to develop a range of skills and competencies, with an overall project coordinator managing the project from start to finish. There will be a focus on team work and collaboration between the participants to realise the production in its entirity.
Through their music-focused activities and partnership with Sunflowerfest, Forestside will have an opportunity to enhance their brand with their target audience of under 25’s. The partnership also promotes and supports cultural visitor events that gives Forestside customers an attractive reason to staycation in NI.
“Forestside have been working with the Sunflowerfest team for 4 years now, and each year we like to push the relationship to a new level. We have always been keen to involve as many young artists as possible in our projects, so when the opportunity arose to widen the scope to include behind the scenes teams we were delighted. The whole concept of “grow your own” excited us from the beginning, with the prospect of guiding young industry professionals through to one day becoming a festival producer/director in their own right. We also felt the element within this project called “Sunflower TV” had benefits on many levels. There is nothing a young musician likes more than for a media team to film your show and then interview you afterwards. Even better is when you combine that with using dynamic social media platforms to get that content out to a wider audience benefitting the artists, the festival and its sponsors.”
Lee Cutler, Centre Manager, Forestside
“Partnering with Forestside has enabled Sunflowerfest to make improvements in many important ways. The sponsorship and managerial consultancy assistance provided by Forestside have helped us improve our budgetary control and strategic planning. It’s also allowed us to make site and infrastructure improvements for the future. This assistance has been especially beneficial during this period of stress and uncertainty and as a result we are weathering the storm and are planning for the future when we can give the young people space and support to enjoy their mini festival and TV show.”
Michael Magowan, Director, Sunflowerfest
“Since 2017 we have been working with Forestside to support young aspiring creatives in the local music scene, and it was fitting to take that support to a new level for 2020. Our Future Festivals program has a focus on production and media elements rather than the artists and it will provide a group of 25 people with training in specific areas of live event and the experience to enable them to pursue or further their careers. It will help us to identify stand out individuals for future freelance contracts and to support young industry professionals across their careers in the festival industry. Working with Lee and Emma and their team at Forestside was a pleasure as it always has been, and we are all looking forward to working with them at Sunflowerfest 2021!”
Aaron Cleary, Producer, Sunflowerfest
