We are delighted to announce that once again John R Ford, Country Properties, BEST trust group and Neville Funerals have agreed to support the festival. Hopefully they are the first of many who will enable us to keep serving Shefford with a full week of activities.

In addition, we are grateful to our other long-term sponsors River Dream Events – who have taken over the admin of the festival and continue to run the Community Market – also the people at LivingLife with all their support alongside Newsline and Shefford Local who are great at publicising our program.

We are delighted to announce that the Community Festival now has a guiding committee which has met twice recently and been very productive – the enthusiasm is brilliant!

Committee members are designated as “Community Festival Ambassadors” who are helping with a great range of ideas and communication activities – please look out for them in the community. Their first action was to propose an early call to invite people and organisations in Shefford to plan your Festival events – so please do so and let us know via the registration page on the website www.sheffordcommunityfestival.co.uk

So when planning your events please ensure that you also plan to promote them – we offer a range of resources to help with that – logos are already downloadable and there is more to follow. Behind the scenes planning and setup will progress from now on and we look forward to working with you to ensure that the festival is a great success yet again this year.

For other contact please email Ian at [email protected]

I am delighted that our next meeting is now confirmed for 7.00pm on Feb 25th in Morrisons community room – and of course, all interested parties are welcome.

The draft agenda is as follows – but please come armed with lots of ideas!

Confirm committee members and exchange of contact details

Notify the community of progress and meeting with a newsletter, web-post and social media regarding dates and progress of the committee

Arrange a home for the website, insurance etc

Bring sponsors up to date and invite them on board for this year

Email to invite participation with events and activities in September

Progressing word of mouth awareness

Discuss how to organise the event list for the coming festival

Considering how we can encourage better event attendance, more events and town centre events.

All the best

Ian

Our first Committee meeting went off brilliantly last Monday when I was able to confirm the Festival dates for this year as September 11th to 20th .

I was also delighted to welcome our first four committee members and the fabulous energy they brought to the project.

Our next meeting is planned for 7.00pm on Feb 25th in Morrisons community room – to be confirmed and of course, all interested parties are welcome.

Please see below notes from the meeting for your interest –

I am progressing with an agenda as follows- and look forward to discussing with people before the meeting or on the day – by all means, if you would like to action anything from the list or add your own suggestion please let me know so we can co-ordinate. My phone is 07860 218334

Confirm meeting with backup venue

Notify the community of progress and meeting with a newsletter, web-post and social media regarding dates and progress of the committee

Arrange a home for the website, insurance etc

Bring sponsors up to date and invite them on board for this year

Email to invite participation with events and activities in September

Progressing word of mouth awareness – your help please on this one

Discuss how to organise the event list for the coming festival

Considering how we can encourage better event attendance, more events and town centre events

Please let me know if you would like to add anything else to this to-do list or just bring it with you to the meeting.

Other great suggestions were

A volunteer fair

Regular coffee mornings in the Community Hall – and to recognise the Monday events at the Baptist Church

The possibility to run courses at the Community Hall 

I hope that helps us move forward, and I look forward to our next meeting.

All the best

Ian

Shefford Community Festival – a new committee – your opportunity to “Make Shefford Great Again!” – no seriously, lets make it an even better place to live………

I am retiring from work and hopefully moving on a little, so think this is an appropriate time to restructure the Shefford Community Festival which I have run for the last eight years, and would therefore like to invite anybody interested to a meeting at 7.00pm in Morrisons Community Room on Monday 2^nd Feb.

Anybody with experience of organising in Shefford will of course be welcome, we need your knowledge and connections, but in particular I would like to encourage people new to Shefford to get in on the next phase of this established event. The main aim of the Festival is to make Shefford a better place to live and there are signs that this is working – so if you care for the community and have the enthusiasm to help I look forward to seeing you there.

Happy New Year

Ian Deavin

Sorry to Nicola King our excellent present Mayor- I wanted to show our previous Prince and Princess – appointments, which for simple lack of support, have gone the way of the pram races, Revs and Rhythms and the gala parade, Will the Community Festival be the next? Maybe we need a properly funded Community Group to support this sort of function – Shefford is growing quickly so there must be rates money in the pot?

Re 2026 – I have had some conversations following my previous posts – sadly nothing yet which suggests that the Festival can be saved for 2026.

For me the question has always been – does Shefford want a Festival? – judging from its success over the past eight years then the answer is yes, but looking at the recent response to the idea of saving it, then probably not.

We have a valuable and successful community event that has been given to the community for free, so now there are so many possibilities: a committee, a Community Interest Company, sell it to an interested business, someone make up the financial cost of admin, an admin partner or something other. Or will it die for lack of positivity?

As I have suggested above I wanted to show our previous Prince and Princess – appointments, which for simple lack of support, have gone the way of the pram races, Revs and Rhythms and the gala parade, Will the Community Festival be the next? Maybe we need a properly funded Community Group to support this sort of function and create a space for new residents to make their contribution – Shefford is growing quickly so there must be many new families looking to take part in the local community – plus the additional rates money, development levies etc. in the pot – I would love to hear we can open up our community organisations and budgets to enable these people to participate in events like these.

Re the Festival, at the moment I am thinking – I have given it a fair effort for 8 years so perhaps just walk away.

Organising the Festival itself is not a great amount of work but I can’t do it on my own so if anyone can think of a viable alternative or thinks they might like to get involved then please contact me to discuss.

Ian Deavin

Mobile 07860 218334 or email [email protected]

Can we keep the Festival going?

To explain,I started the festival because a gap was identified at a Community Hall committee meeting and I was asked to “see what you can do”. Since then the festival has been supported for the past eight years on a pro bono basis, by my marketing business, including my colleague Sue Warne and my partner Lesley Whiteman who have worked hard on the website, social media and creative/admin to deal with databases, newsletters, posters and banners etc.

In that time the Festival has resulted in a number of spinoffs and boosted other activities. Plus of course we have had the continuing support of Shefford Newsline and LivingLife magazines – without these people and publications the Festival would not have been possible – may I take this opportunity to say thank you. In recent years we have also been supported by community minded sponsors, but this has gone only a small way to covering the cost of running the festival – thank you also.

Unfortunately I now have to close my marketing business, which means I no longer have to hand either the money or the people needed to continue the Festival, and raises the question of how to move the Festival forward, indeed whether to do so at all?

There is clearly a resource gap of people and/or money which I don’t have, but may be available elsewhere in Shefford?

To put this in context I have also had a number of conversations recently with people who have suggested a wider “town association” arrangement of all the town stakeholders as a proactive forum for community events generally in support of the council, and maybe this might find a connection with the community festival?

For information I would normally start planning the festival for next year in January so I would welcome any ideas. Please contact me here [email protected] or on 07860 218334

We have usually managed to arrange for the guys at EatFeast to visit Shefford in coincidence with the week of the Festival – unfortunately, that was not possible this year but it did mean that we had yummy street food to look forward to as a delayed event.

Along with quite a few others we walked into town to sample what was on offer and had a very enjoyable evening as the weather held up for us, just “chilling” in the town.  Our little town centre is getting busier these days, with street food, the Friday market and the Community Market (expanding the High Street into Pamoli Square)  – it will soon be used for the Charter Fair and the Christmas Lights. As we saw recently on film at the Community Hall history presentation, the town centre used to be used for Pram Races and a market that stretched across the pavements the full length of the High Street on both sides of the street. Interestingly, it looked like they didn’t even close the road to traffic!

I recently received photos from Sunday’s community lunch at the Baptist Church with the following note from Erica Bowler “Unfortunately, we were having far too much fun with the activities at Messy Church and completely forgot to get any photos from that! But it was wonderful chaotic and thought-provoking fun, with 43 people present.”