2024-12-31-accounts

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Ham Farm Festival

Annual Report and Accounts for the period 1st January 2024 until 31st December 2024

Ham Farm Festival Report of the Trustees for 2024

Reference and administrative details

The charity is named the Ham Farm Festival Charity number: 1202940

Trustees

Myriam Gamble Emily Correa Francisco Correa Mark Gilbertson Deborah Willington: January - September 2024 Phil Bunce: September - December 2024

Operational address and registered office

Ham Farm Cottage, Emersons Green Lane, Mangotsfield, Bristol BS16 7AT

Independent examiner

Financial records were examined in detail and signed off by independent accountant Roberta Sunderland in January 2025.

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Ham Farm Festival Report of the Trustees for 2024

The charity

The Ham Farm Festival first took place in July 2021 as a private venture by Emily and Francisco Correa. After another successful episode in July 2022, a charity was established in May 2023 in order to formalise its structure, improve funding opportunities, and ensure that the public benefits that had been at the heart of it since the beginning would be more formally realised and recognised. Since the formation of a charity there was another successful edition of the festival in July 2024.

Structure, governance and management

The charity is a Charitable Incorporated Organisation based in England whose only voting members are its trustees. The CIO was incorporated through a constitution on 4th May 2023. Initially the trustees for the period were Emily Correa, Francisco Correa, Mark Gilbertson, Deborah Willington, and Myriam Gamble. Deborah Willington resigned at the AGM on 29th September 2024 and was replaced by Philip Bunce. The membership and activity of the trustees and their powers are regulated by the charity’s constitution.

The artistic directors and operational managers of the charity are Francisco and Emily Correa. Any payments to them made with respect to these duties or other activities such as performance are explicitly accounted for and the circumstances under which payments may be made to them is governed by the CIO’s constitution and an explicit policy. Mark Gilbertson, Deborah Willington, Philip Bunce, and Myriam Gamble do not receive any benefit or payment from the CIO.

The CIO has enabled the development of robust policies for all aspects of the festival, including safeguarding policies and the appointment of an official safeguarding officer from our trustees, an evidence of artistic integrity policy, an equality, diversity and inclusion policy, and a formal premises lease agreement.

There are no exemptions to disclosure and there are no funds for which the CIO is the custodian trustee.

Objectives and activities

The object of the charity is for the public benefit, to promote and advance education in, and the public’s appreciation of, music and other arts, in particular, but not exclusively, by the presentation of an annual music festival in South Gloucestershire.

The activities of the CIO centre on the main summer Festival, also known as Ham Farm Festival, which took place 27th-29th July 2024. The programme was a mixture of workshops, family and community concerts, and high-quality professional musical performances of a variety of musical genres. A full programme is attached.

In addition, the charity held a Young Performers’ Spotlight concert in collaboration with West of England Music and Arts, where there was 30 mins of young people performing before an interval, and then 1 hour of Filkins Drift, a folk duo which performed in the 2023 festival. It was a very successful event that was sold out. The charity also held two concerts in care homes and two in hospitals during the year.

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Ham Farm Festival Report of the Trustees for 2024

The charity built on the experience so far accumulated.

Achievements and performance

The festival was very successful, achieving progress in delivering the CIO’s objective. The objectives for 2024 were as follows.

• Continuing to build our audience base, mailing list numbers and followers. The email list subscribers grew 10% in the year, and social media followers grew around 27%. We reached new audiences with our extended door flyering campaign, and had many first-time visitors to the Festival. We are also starting to be a name/brand people have heard of. Attendance at our evening ticketed double-bill concerts was the highest yet, almost reaching capacity each night for the first time since the Festival began.

• Further strengthening our relationship with the local town council and unitary authority as well as other potential funding bodies. The CIO wants to ensure that it delivers an event which enriches the area and appeals to all cross sections of the local population as well as drawing people from further afield . The CIO worked closely with the town council to achieve their objectives particularly around youths and participation. Our collaboration with West of England Music and Arts (both for the April spotlight concert and for South Glos Rock and Pop school concert at the main festival) was a direct response to this objective, and did indeed involve many youths in our activities, as well as achieving our own objective of drawing people from further in South Glos who otherwise would not have come to Ham Farm Festival.

• Working with local hospitals and schools to strengthen our outreach work. We established a new relationship with Southmead Hospital and Bristol Heart Institute, where we put on two concerts subsidised by the CIO. Both were very well received and providing we have sufficient funding this relationship will continue. We plan to further develop our work with schools in 2025 in order to bring high quality live music to the school children and further strengthen our relationships. We already enjoy the support of local schools, in being able to borrow their equipment for our summer festival, saving thousands of pounds.

• Establishing the right pricing policy which encourages people to pay more to support the arts if they are able to while subsidising very cheap tickets for people who cannot afford more. We trialled a new pricing policy based not on age or status (student, retired etc) but instead on what people can afford, offering a choice of full price £22, £18 if you prefer, and pay what you can from £12 if you need. The majority of our audience paid the full price, but people did take us up on the £12 tickets as well, showing there was a need for the cheaper option but there was no evidence of it being abused. As well as encouraging inclusion, the income from ticket sales was significantly more than in previous years.

• Establishing an easy donation method for well wishers, and benefiting from gift aid on donations received. We set up gift aid on all donations and a link on our website for well-wishers to donate (with gift aid) directly to Ham Farm Festival. We also claimed gift aid for the income from the fundraising concert in July. We asked for donations after our free daytime concerts and although there was some income, overall this was not significant: the demographic who comes to free events generally does not donate.

• Improving the festival bar, both aesthetically and the options on offer, and pricing appropriately so that people buy drinks from us by preference. We achieved a large

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Ham Farm Festival Report of the Trustees for 2024

improvement. A volunteer created a reusable and storable bar structure for us which was aesthetically pleasing, and the bar took a much larger income than in previous years. We charged more for alcoholic drinks (in line with or just under local pub prices) and did not suffer from drunkenness as a result. Carried-over stock should further increase net revenue in 2025.

• Create a volunteering policy and harness the power of local well-wishers to create a team of local volunteers to help with the event. A formal volunteering policy is still in development, but recruitment was very successful and the feedback is that the experience of volunteers was very positive.

Public benefits of activities

The trustees have had regard to the Charity Commission’s guidance on public benefit.

• Providing world-class concerts in an area where little high-quality live music happens.

• Encouraging people to come to concerts who rarely go to concerts otherwise, by being local, affordable, and programming at earlier times of day (good for families or parents of small children, of which there are many in the area)

• Enabling people to discover and connect with new types of music, broadening their musical horizons, through deliberately cross-genre programming

• Varied workshops aimed at all ages, and at different types of day, all heavily subsidised or free to attend, have attracted participants from 3 - 80, from the local area and from Bristol. These were often sold out and opened waiting lists, showing the high demand for inclusive, interactive and affordable musical workshops in the area.

• Taking the festival to people who may not have access to high-quality live music concerts. This was done through organising and subsidising professional concerts at care homes and hospitals, and by running two fully-funded workshops in a local school - this area of our outreach work is being significantly expanded in 2025.

• Inclusive programming including a specialist autistic-friendly concert and free drop-in day time concerts.

• Direct involvement and programming of youths and teenagers, who are notoriously hard to engage with community activities, through collaboration with the local music hub. This is aligned with a main objective of Emersons Green Town Council.

• Sense of pride in the area for local residents, as this music festival puts Emersons Green on the map and draws people from further afield, creating a buzz around the area.

• Access for all to high-quality music with a pay-what-you-can cheap ticket tier and an e-mail-and-ask policy for those who feel that this may still put the festival beyond their reach.

• Paid opportunities for young people to work on the festival as a first work experience: We gave jobs to ten young people aged 14-17, which gave them a sense of independence, something productive to do after exams, and practical work experience (e.g. using card readers, checking tickets, customer relations). The job also provided these youths with references and something for their CV when looking for other jobs. There was very high demand for these opportunities, and the application and interview process was a useful learning experience for everyone who applied, even those who were not ultimately offered work.

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Ham Farm Festival Report of the Trustees for 2024

Financial review

The CIO receives income from grants, ticket sales, and individual donations including gift aid. There is also some income from drink sales during events. The CIO is - and always will be - heavily reliant on successful funding bids, as ticket sales alone will never pay for the festival due to the gap between what the arts cost and what the public will pay for a concert. There were successful grant funding applications both to South Gloucestershire Council and to Emersons Green Town Council, and a good relationship has been established with the local town council for ongoing partnership and funding .

These funding bids took place and all money received by April 2024, before events were advertised and tickets went on sale, ensuring that the final programme for the Festival could be determined based on the security of the grants already received, with relatively small risk coming from variable ticket and drinks sales.

The charity also benefited from substantial donations of £700 from a charity concert in early July 2024, held in the private house of a local well-wisher and philanthropist who wished to support the Festival in this way. Largely as a result of this, the CIO achieved a small surplus in the calendar year 2024 of £361. Unusually, the Trustees decided to carry this surplus forward into 2025, due to funding uncertainty at the close of year as a result of South Gloucestershire Council closing its Area Wide Grants scheme, which has funded the past 4 festivals, and no other funding body applied to having made a decision on funding yet by the close of year. The CIO cannot accumulate reserves as this would not be allowed by the grant-making policies and any surplus would be liable for claw-back by the granting bodies, but on this occasion it was decided to defer a decision on how this extra money would be spent until Spring 2025.

It is a point of principle for the CIO that it does not exploit the people who contribute to the festival and that the financial result was achieved by paying all professional musicians and sound engineers professional rates for every event (always at least Musicians’ Union rates).

The greatest risks to the charity are failure to secure grants within a currently constrained funding environment and low ticket sales, especially as many people are reluctant to book tickets in advance and this seems to be an increasing trend. In mitigation of these risks:

• Should funding bids be unsuccessful this would be known in advance and the festival activities could be scaled back to take account of the more limited funds than anticipated - plus more funding bids/ fundraising events could be done as well.

• Should there be a shortfall due to low ticket sales, the artistic directors have agreed to defer any payments that would be due to them, including the repayment of the marquee loan mentioned above, and extension of the loan for an extra year if necessary.

Objectives for 2025

• Continuing to build our audience base, mailing list numbers and followers.

• ● Continuing to build audience trust - measured by many people coming to concerts or events of genres they would not normally go to. We wish people to trust the Festival, and know any concert at Ham Farm Festival will be excellent and enjoyable.

• Further strengthening our relationship with the local town council and unitary authority and foster further links with other potential funding bodies. The CIO wants

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Ham Farm Festival Report of the Trustees for 2024

to ensure that it delivers an event which enriches the area and appeals to all cross sections of the local population as well as drawing people from further afield.

• Continue our work with local hospitals and care homes, ensuring we continue to bring music into the community to those who cannot access it.

• Scale up our work with schools during the year, outside our main Festival time, by working with all four local schools to bring world-class concerts and interactive, educational workshops to hundreds of children in the Emersons Green town boundary. We will seek extra funding for this branch of outreach, and manage it separately to our main Festival.

• Continue monitoring the pricing policy so that it encourages people to pay more to support the arts if they are able to while subsidising very cheap tickets for people who cannot afford more.

• Continue development of a donation method for well wishers and benefiting from gift aid on donations received, as well as working on ways to encourage the public to donate where possible after free or low cost daytime events.

• Create a volunteering policy and harness the power of local well-wishers to create a team of local volunteers to help with the event.

• Consider measures to improve the access to the festival for those of limited mobility.

• Working on audience diversity through marketing strategies, partnerships with ethnic minority groups in Bristol, programming to attract a diverse audience, and geographically strategic advertising where possible.

• Diversity of role models - while working within the boundaries laid out by our Artist Selection Criteria, our Artistic Directors will continue to consider the ethnic diversity of musicians booked for Ham Farm Festival. We want to represent diversity in our programming and advertising, as well as in the styles of music we offer, and to achieve a brilliant showcase of the diversity of the music industry as a result. Our programmed musicians are featured on all posters and flyers, which are seen by many thousands of people, so even people who don’t come to the festival are affected positively by the diverse role models represented on our posters.

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Ham Farm Festival Income Expenditure Summary 2024

INCOME
care home concert subsidies donations and gift aid food and drinks sale funding ticket sales	£320.00 £1,908.62 £1,455.63 £6,500.00 £4,957.29
	£15,141.54
EXPENDITURE
Artist fees Artist food equipment Food and drinks stock for sale insurance loan repayment miscellaneous expenses overheads printing publicity venue wages	£7,143.71 £422.13 £563.83 £1,235.81 £340.50 £400.00 £352.21 £241.00 £340.30 £855.25 £205.00 £2,680.57
	£14,780.31
GAIN (OR LOSS) IN RESERVES DURING YEAR	£361.23
Starting balance Gain (or loss) in reserves during year Finishing balance as a 31/12/2024	£395.83 £361.23 £757.06

INCOME
care home concert subsidies donations and gift aid food and drinks sale funding ticket sales	£320.00 £1,908.62 £1,455.63 £6,500.00 £4,957.29
	£15,141.54
EXPENDITURE
Artist fees Artist food equipment Food and drinks stock for sale insurance loan repayment miscellaneous expenses overheads printing publicity venue wages	£7,143.71 £422.13 £563.83 £1,235.81 £340.50 £400.00 £352.21 £241.00 £340.30 £855.25 £205.00 £2,680.57
	£14,780.31
GAIN (OR LOSS) IN RESERVES DURING YEAR	£361.23
Starting balance Gain (or loss) in reserves during year Finishing balance as a 31/12/2024	£395.83 £361.23 £757.06

Prepared by Trustee and Treasurer Emily Correa on 02/01/2025

Independently reviewed by Roberta Sunderland ACMA