About

Brighouse Arts Festival is organised by the local not-for-profit charity Arts for Brighouse. We employ the arts to advance the education, promote public appreciation, and engage with communities, for the people of Brighouse and the borough of Calderdale, West Yorkshire.

Brighouse Arts Festival 2019 will enable arts to be a vital role in enabling Brighouse to become a culturally active place to live and visit. This year’s theme is ‘Spotlight on Brighouse’ – as we will promote the town on a national level whilst using the arts as a catalyst for social cohesion and to bring people together and build strong relationships in and across communities. Our high quality and unique arts festival has run for seven years and has been organised by our charity volunteers for the past three years.

It has been highly successful with our 2018 festival seeing 8,000 audience members and 278,000 online engagements. We programmed 265 artists and the festival was organised by 40 volunteers. Most importantly, we engaged 6,536 people in free activities, 649 young people attend the festival, 3,920 audience members were aged over 65, and over £80,000 went into the local economy.

We will champion methods of reaching out and increase accessibility to the arts, for example introducing sign interpreters at specific spoken word events to ensure that we engage community members and reaching those who may find barriers to engaging in activities.

We are looking for new volunteer roles in the design, development, and delivery of the project. If you feel like you have the skills to join our volunteer team – please get in touch!