About
Festival Stoke is a collaborative of positive and creative people who have chosen to work together.
Our aim is to celebrate all that is good about Stoke, both the town where we are based, and the wider city too.
We love to bring positive change into the community working with local people using creative participatory activities and organising events which highlight the good characteristics and distinctive heritage of the town and city.
We want people to feel more positive about the place where they live, work and spend leisure time. Through working with both experienced and emerging creative and community practitioners we seek to encourage a wider appreciation and enjoyment of creative arts and heritage assets throughout the town and city.
Within the team are experienced event organisers and skilled participatory creative practitioners, and we are fortunate to work with lots of gifted and clever people with a wide range of skills, from the city and from further afield too.
Our aim is to celebrate all that is good about Stoke, both the town where we are based, and the wider city too.
We love to bring positive change into the community working with local people using creative participatory activities and organising events which highlight the good characteristics and distinctive heritage of the town and city.
We want people to feel more positive about the place where they live, work and spend leisure time. Through working with both experienced and emerging creative and community practitioners we seek to encourage a wider appreciation and enjoyment of creative arts and heritage assets throughout the town and city.
Within the team are experienced event organisers and skilled participatory creative practitioners, and we are fortunate to work with lots of gifted and clever people with a wide range of skills, from the city and from further afield too.
Our Story
Festival Stoke was created out of a community-led organisation in 2014 based in the town of Stoke in the city of Stoke-on-Trent. Our aim has always been to bring positive change into the community through delivering high quality participatory creative arts activities.
Through the work we do we seek to encourage positivity and a ‘can-do’ attitude and counter negativity and the ingrained ‘can’t-do’ attitude, through encouraging people to believe in their own abilities and the potential of Stoke-on-Trent.
Over the years we have worked together we have focussed on managing and delivering projects which are aimed at highlighting what is good about the town and city. We do this through working with people who live and work in Stoke, encouraging them to see past the post-industrial decline of the surrounding environment to the positive characteristics of the place. We encourage people to take a second look at what is around them, to see the place through a new lens instead of only seeing the place through prevailing ‘decline of industry and the potteries’ lens.
We have extensive experience of engaging with local people, including community groups, local businesses, and work with people in open-access public spaces. We have experience of working with people who face disadvantages due to physical limitations or mental health problems, people with learning disabilities and their carers, and the many children and adults experiencing negative effects of living with poverty across the city.
Our projects are always shaped by the community and the people we engage with and appropriate to their needs, whilst including activities which take them outside their comfort zone to discover new things, both about themselves and about the place they are located. We are skilled in using gentle and invitational provocation to encourage people to think beyond their assumptions, prejudices and limitations.