Behind the stage, an economy: why festivals still deserve support

It is this type of festival, with a huge budget, that can help and sustain an entire ecosystem: artists, businesses, and above all the community. But to get there, you need partners and funders who understand, who see the point of the enterprise and help the festival develop and grow. Partners play a vital role. To go further, a festival must not be seen as mere entertainment: you have to see the importance of what the big festivals do.

Do promoters manage to convince funders? For many, unfortunately, the very essence of festivals and events is poorly perceived, poorly understood. When artists are permanently out of work and among the worst-paid workers, a festival welcoming international artists and festival-goers — who come sleep nights in hotels, lunch and dine in restaurants, shop in markets, play on the festival site, hold signing sessions and live in the country like kings and queens. The promoter of a big festival is not just someone who organises events: it is someone who serves the country, promoting tourism and creating jobs.

The example that speaks to me most? Caribana 2024. The year the festival hosted me alongside the beautiful voice of Queen Rima, King Baba, and many other great artists from Guinea, the Land of the Rivers of the South. The organisers designated a luxury hotel for our comfort and well-being. As I work for Swiss media, they then showed me the city of Lausanne, before handing me the carte des saveurs, to discover the richness of Swiss wines.

I have told you about its economic benefits for hotels, restaurants, caterers, technicians, artisans. When there are more people, it's good. Another angle: event tourism exports the image of the town and the country. Yes, while foreign festival-goers are visiting as tourists, they have the opportunity to shop and to promote so-and-so and company. When they leave, they speak well of such-and-such a country. Imagine a mountain in Switzerland, or a great garden in Guinea. When press articles recount the festivities, they evoke the flavours of the festival town, the historic places, the memory of a dish discovered in town; they speak of the culture, and they can speak of the nature, of the particularity.

We keep coming back to the fact that an international festival exports itself, creates jobs for young people, adds value to the town's or site's infrastructure, handles a significant budget that puts businesses to work. Festivals also employ volunteers, assistant extras, external providers, artistic communicators, labourers and construction workers. It is a circuit that feeds hotels and guest houses, campsites, restaurants, bars, transport, local shops, airlines, farmers' markets, market gardeners, growers, vegetables, fruit trees… EVERYTHING. Everyone benefits.

I have to say it: funders have not always had this constructive and salutary critique. The surrounding ministry of Culture, Arts and Heritage, the embassies of different countries, the organisations working for sustainable development, the private companies looking to enhance their image and reputation — everyone should hold hands to help each other grow. A festival is an ecosystem. Culture is what makes a country attractive. Campsites, artisans, butchers, restaurants, market artisans: isn't that a way of aligning culture sustainably?

On the funders' side: Health Canada, the Canada Council for the Arts, Canadian Heritage, the culture ministries of the various countries, the Montreal arts council, the city, the districts, the political institutions. Everyone can take part. And when a festival is international, there are the Canadian representations abroad: chancelleries, embassies, consuls general, the visitor exchange programme, the sharing of practices from one country to another; because a festival must be attractive, internationally attractive, and do great promotion. Yes! A festival must rest on objective criteria to have lasting foundations.

The festival economy is inspired by “the dimension of the circular economy”, meaning that all the money earned by participants goes to the town's tourism spending, and that artisans and market gardeners create added value for everyone. With money circulating in the country, culture becomes sustainable and growing — and Geneva? Caribana is there for excellence.

So what we want to say here to partners and funders is that wherever you are in the world, when you support the festivals around you, you do it for everything we have listed, all these games we have listed. You also play a strategic role in the economic and community development of the territories, and this support must not be limited to the biggest festivals: it must extend to the smallest too, because the small ones are the base, and tomorrow they can become very big. While bearing the pressure of operating costs, the locations remain possible, the door to fundable misery that remains very fragile.

There are guides and platforms to help organisers: see canada.ca (Guide and Companions), the website of Quebec's ministry of Tourism (quebec.ca) and the publications of organisations like the CQFA.

Festival funding, based on patronage, partnership and sponsorship, has structural support when it comes to the heritage of small and big funders. There is crowdfunding, or funding by the crowd, which lets festival-goers take part in financing a festival that cannot easily find someone to fund it. One can contribute to the collective through sponsorship, by offering one's support.

Take the example of borderless crowdfunding, which lets people fund festivals on the other side of the world: it is a way of sustaining duration. Festival funding is a pillar of the personal and social development of culture: without outside support, few festivals would survive. So partners, sponsors and funders are essential to promoting the town. The participant who covers the festival — that is, a medium like myself — covers that festival in proportion to the partners. We must not stop supporting festivals, because they can be rustic, rural and reject strategies, but they become less efficient.

And to hear that, precisely, last summer I organised a press conference with a great Guinean personality, dedicated to Caribana, so that young people from Caribana could meet in Côte d'Ivoire the ministry of Tourism and Culture: well before Easter. It is not only promoting the culture from here, but speaking of the local economy, of the Quebec ecosystem. Festivals are engines of culture: pan-Canadian, pan-European or pan-African, their economic benefits are significant, especially for accommodation, and in the regions, that is very often what the funding and everything that makes an ecosystem bring in.

For partners and funders, supporting a festival is not buying a poster or a logo on a board. It is investing in a community, in a collective memory, in memories people will keep all their lives. Without you, there would be no discovery, no encounter, no celebration and no artists. By supporting, you make the celebration possible: people who work there, musicians who take the stage, visitors who discover a place, merchants who flourish, villages that come to life.

Do not let festivals go out, because if partners are no longer there, there will be no living stages left. A festival brings happiness; the money withdrawn to support a festival does not disappear: it turns into jobs, into economic benefits, into human experiences. And that is where life is watered, remembering that every festival that is born creates a virtuous circle: culture feeds the economy, and the economy feeds culture.

Our gratitude, we explorers, is to know that without you, partners and funders, we would have no explorers either, for you are the pillars of these interviews. It is the festivals that send us, and we redirect these actions to Bahrain. Keep supporting festivals and backing them greatly — the partner's work is not finished.