2025 will celebrate 10 years of lighting up Barton Hill, Redfield and St George with Church Road Lanterns which, since its beginnings has aimed to unite different communities living close together.
In the Beginning...
Church Road Lantern Parade began in 2014 to create a common celebration along the main shopping and travel route through our wonderful diverse community. The aim then and now was to create a parade of joy, peace and light following negative far right activity on Church Road in 2013. We all know from the riots this Summer that this work is more important now than ever.
The first parade in 2014 created 28 lanterns with 60 children and hundreds of people turned up! Our last parade in March 2023 was a joyous event with over 500 lanterns and 6000 people included. The amount of people coming to workshops and joining in with the fun of the parade has grown as has the amount of money needed to create the event.
Now...
Through its Imagination Fund, Bristol City Council is supporting the event with £10,000 match funding a year over the next two years and The National Lottery 'Awards For All ' is supporting lantern making with low income participants which is fantastic. However we still have a further target of £10,000. We hope to raise £5000 with this Crowdfunder campaign.
Following the parade in March last year we ran a community survey, we had so many great comments including:
"So glad the parade happened again this year, it's a brilliant community event."
"Thought it was a fantastic event... great to use the park and get families out in the evening. It was really well attended, my kids loved being ab le to make their own lanterns and take part, but also seeing the impressive lanterns in the parade. Great to see the community getting involved."
"Such a wonderful family event, really well organised and so much fun despite the pouring rain. Well done"
Financially supporting this crowd funder will enable Lamplighter Arts CIC to levy the funds to plan and organise a workshop programme across the area and bring the parade activity back into the heart of our diverse community.
The volume of people attending Church Road Lanterns involves a lot of traffic management/ health and safety planning and logistics. Lamplighter Arts CIC need to request Bristol City Council's permission for the event 3-4 months in advance showing a rigorous stewarding plan so we need all the pieces of the funding puzzle in place.
Our theme for our work in 2025 is " It's Going To Be WILD " and the lanterns will support a greater connection to nature within the community. Lamplighter Arts CIC hope, that with funding achieved Community Arts work will begin again across our area in early Spring 2025.
The theme will both celebrate and explore the wildlife where we live and work in BS5 and inspire positive community action to build climate resilience. Lantern making workshops will be used as a tool for communities to discuss habitat recreation, aiming to preserve and support the biodiversity of our natural world.
What the Crowdfunder will fund
Those people who know the project well, will expect lanterns large and small. These will be made in community and after school workshops. Some workshops are part funded by community lantern builders, others such as school workshops and outreach workshops still need funding.
Using a Crowdfunder enables the communities money to go further by encouraging larger donors to match fund and helps show wide community support. The lanterns we make will celebrate many parts of BS5's natural world such as the endangered tawny owls living in St George Park, the diversity of bees on Troopers Hill (85 different species and counting!!!) and raise awareness about plants such as the humble cowslips growing on Netham Park.
Lamplighter Arts CIC have been experimenting with infusing local wild flower seeds into their lanterns to support pollinators for the last 18 months. School and community lanterns will be infused with plantable wild flower seeds which we will encourage to be planted following the parade in Spring 2025.
Rewards...
Our rewards encourage early support for our fundraising GLOW at The Beehive Centre over the Winter Solstice or think about buying a lantern kit for a fun home activity with children or a Christmas gift. Take a look at a more complicated white peace doves kit as designed for Glastonbury Festival as a suitable gift for adults and older children.
You can sign up to as many rewards as you like, we really hope to meet our target and we can all have some fun along the way and look forward to a big celebratory parade in 2025..
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