News
Call for EFA Members: Festivals Care!
24 January 2025
A working group on Arts, Health and Well-Being
For more than 70 years, the European Festivals Association (EFA) has been a place for connection for arts festivals and festival makers across Europe and beyond. EFA is a ‘We-Story’ of people and organisations - increasing its scope from being an exclusive membership organisation to a larger community that includes festivals of all disciplines and sizes and individuals, through various channels and community building activities. In all its conversations, EFA puts the artistic dialogue forward, and the place of festivals, and the arts, in society including most recently festivals’ potential / task to nurture health and well-being – within their teams, among their audiences, and in the wider communities they serve.
Arts, festivals, and cultural activities have proved to be essential for building healthier societies and promoting well-being. The CultureForHealth report reviewed 310 studies and confirmed the positive impact of culture on both individual and community health, aligning with similar findings from the World Health Organisation (WHO). Cultural activities can work alongside traditional medical care to enhance emotional well-being, strengthen social bonds, and support healthier communities. The festivals’ community contributes to this task and has expressed a desire to better integrate well-being into what festivals do and their ways of working and in this way improve living and working conditions and well-being of artists, festival makers and their teams.
The pilot retreat and workshop “The Time We Spend Together”, hosted by the Varna Summer International Music Festival in 2023, was a key moment for EFA in understanding the need to address the topic of well-being within the festival community. Over three days, festival makers came together to discuss how festivals can better support their teams, artists, and audiences while managing the challenges of their work. A workshop within the Summit 2024 on Usedom, the insights gathered through the EFFEA Duty of Care Protocol and the research done within Perform Europe also confirmed the growing attention festivals and festival makers seem to have to care for each other, for artists, audiences, and the broader cultural ecosystem.
In the framework of the Creative Europe-supported project CARE – Culture for Mental Health carried by an international consortium led by the Cluj Cultural Centre and joined by seven partners across Europe, EFA has the chance to delve deeper into this topic with you, dear members. A working group will provide a space for a small group of EFA members for reflection, shared learning, and collaboration, drawing on the collective knowledge and experiences of EFA members.
The CARE project aims to harness the potential of arts and cultural experiences to improve mental health and well-being for youth, working-age individuals, and people with disabilities. By bringing together stakeholders from culture, health, education, and business, the initiative develops innovative strategies that provide both personal and systemic solutions. These efforts focus on enhancing access to and participation in cultural activities across Europe, addressing the pressing challenge of mental health, which affects over 85 million EU citizens.
If you are interested in knowing more about it or becoming part of this working group, please do not hesitate to write to Ana Benavides Otero (ana[@]efa-aef.eu) from the EFA Team.
This invitation is open to EFA members only.