Our Partner Christian Aid presents…The Bank of The Common Good
We’re so close to the Festival now, we can almost touch it! We can’t wait to welcome you all into our Christian Aid venue onsite. But what can you expect to find when you get there?
This year we’re thrilled to reveal our Escape Room! Pit your wits against our fiendish puzzles with your family or friends. Can you infiltrate the bank vault, find out what the bank is really doing with your hard-earned cash, and escape before you’re discovered? The Escape Room is running all through the weekend; book early to avoid disappointment.
Banking is the theme for our venue because we want to know what UK banks are doing about climate change. We think they could be doing a whole lot better with our money, investing in the renewable energy of the future instead of out-dated coal, oil and gas. Find out more about our joint campaign with Greenbelt to make the Big Shift away from fossil fuels and into clean energy and take our campaign card action. There’ll be a few surprises around the site too – fighting coins and giant piggy banks, anyone?
Our wonderful café is back, with delicious, good-value cakes and hot and cold drinks on sale. New for 2017 is our partnership with the Real Junk Food Project, who create great-tasting meals out of food that would otherwise be thrown away. Every year, about one third of the food produced in the world for people to eat gets lost or wasted. This means that energy has been used to produce and transport that food, pumping carbon into the atmosphere, contributing to climate change, only for it all to end up in the bin! So, we are delighted to be able to work with an organisation which is doing something really practical about the massive issue of food waste.
We’ll be welcoming lots of guests who’ll be popping in over the weekend: global economist Ann Pettifor, Green Party politician Natalie Bennett, theologian Justin Thacker, craftivist Sarah Corbett and the Most Rev Dr Winston Halapua, Archbishop of Polynesia. Around all weekend is our artist in residence, I.D. Campbell, from Glasgow. Well-used to painting in public, Iain will be painting people who are affected by climate change in the Philippines throughout the weekend. You’ll be able to hear more about these people in our nightly bedtime story, and you’ll be able to bid for one of Iain’s portraits in a silent auction. He’ll also be leading two Gospel Sketchbook drawing workshops, demystifying art and the Bible for anyone, however you feel about your artistic ability.
Our packed programme includes dancing and debate, worship and workshops, food and finance, gender and justice, banking and breakfast, quilting and campaigning, piggy banks and prayer, monopoly and money (or even monopoly money). Intrigued? We hope so. Come and find out what it’s all about.