Conference 2026: Resilient Festivals

Headline sponsor: Graham Sykes Insurance

Thanks to everyone who joined us in Birmingham for this year’s BAFA Conference for Festivals!

Naomi Taylor, the BAFA/Birmingham City University Collaborative Doctoral Award candidate, gave a brilliant summary of the two days of the event here:

2025 was a landmark year for BAFA, and in 2026 we are building on that, looking at developing this network of Resilient Festivals through new toolkits, and a powerful new recruitment process through RISE. We hear of BAFA’s “gift to [us] all” with the easy-to-use toolkit for sustainability. We launched the BAFA exhibition and looked at evolution and change both reflectively and proactively. We talked about the future and we connected and reconnected to why we are all here.

Through our Lightning Talks over the past two days we have been introduced or re-introduced to organisations who are here to help us evolve into happier, safer, more diverse and inclusive spaces. We were given tools to start to make sense of disparate data of different types and to turn that into a narrative that can be used to tell the story of your festivals — and on the theme of narrative, we were invited to “Go All In” with reading this year.

We were reminded that “Accessibility should always be on the agenda”: we need to remove barriers proactively. We saw through different lenses how we can develop partnerships in different ways, how we can learn and grow through reaching out and opening up to others — and how we might learn the most important lessons in unexpected places. We saw that we need different partners and different people at different points as we work through challenges — and we were reminded that change isn’t linear.

In those crucial conversations around Building Brave Spaces we heard the message that we can’t expect one another to be something that we’re not. We heard the affirming message that we are here to create those brave spaces for artists to say difficult things. We were reminded that “Art has the power to spark courageous conversations”.

Despite the way many of us feel sometimes, we were assured that the funding picture is not all doom and gloom, and we heard practical advice for making sure we are fundraising-ready, and ensuring our festivals are “fundable and findable”.

We have heard inspiring stories of culture and festivals across the country, we have championed each other and we have been reminded of both the power and the responsibility we have as a network, a community and a sector to share knowledge, to spread the word and to support each other — which is, after all, what BAFA is all about.

Watch this space for announcements on the 2027 Conference dates and location – members and ticket holders can access the 2026 Conference resources on a private webpage, which includes audio recordings, notes, presentations and links to helpful resources.