Becky Burchell and the Change Festival Team declared the following Climate and Ecological Emergency on 3 April 2019.

We, CHANGE Festival, declare a Climate and Ecological Emergency.

CHANGE Festival is an arts festival that brings people together in hope and in action to imagine BETTER. Our aim is to celebrate, to inspire, to change the way we relate to one another, change our actions, change our preconceptions, our limitations and change our world. 

It is with a heavy heart that we declare a climate emergency, and we do so in the spirit of hope rather than despair. We do so because we cannot move forward until we are honest with each other about the situation that our living world faces. We cannot build on misinformation, falsehoods and denial. We CAN build on truth, on necessity and on courage. 

Now is the time for action, for bravery and for hope. 

Remember our favourite phrase:

Hope is a verb with its sleeves rolled up.

We pledge to work with and support our community and local government in tackling this Emergency, and we call on others to do the same. 

These are our intentions:

1. We will tell the Truth.

We will not hide from the realities that face humanity and our living world: we cannot grow and we cannot change when we are not honest.

We will encourage everyone to acknowledge the truth of the Climate and Ecological Emergency.

And most importantly: we will support the ingenuity, imagination and hard work required to achieve systemic change. 

2. We will take Action.

We will continue to actively work to imagine and model ways that our organisation can regenerate the planet’s resources. 

We will challenge policies and actions of local and national governments and their agencies, where we interact with them, that do not help to reduce emissions or consumption levels.

We pledge to work towards reducing our emissions to net zero by 2025.

We will produce CHANGE Festival, an event that invites people to come together to support one another on this crucial journey to transformation.

We will produce ‘The World We Made’, a play that explores the roles that each of us can play in creating a better future.

3. We are committed to Justice

We will do what is possible to enable dialogue and expression amidst our communities about how the Emergency will affect them and the changes that are needed. 

We believe that all truth-telling, action and democratic work must be underpinned by a commitment to justice based on intersectional principles, led by the marginalised and the underrepresented.

We will not give up. CHANGE is happening.

Becky, Festival Director and the CHANGE Team