Manchester International Festival
Manchester International Festival is the world’s first festival of original, new work and special events, and takes place biennially in Manchester, UK. The Festival launched in 2007 as an artist-led, commissioning festival presenting new works from across the spectrum of performing arts, visual arts and popular culture including group show Il Tempo del Postino, featuring artists including Matthew Barney and Olafur Eliasson and Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett’s Monkey: Journey to the West.
| What |
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| When |
Jun 30, 2011 12:55 PM
to Jul 17, 2011 12:55 PM |
| Where | Manchester |
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Cultural venues across the city are involved in various projects but two key aspects are the role of volunteers in the festival and their commitment to local sustainability.
Volunteers
There are many opportunities for the public to get involved in the Festival. The MIF volunteer scheme welcomed more than 300 local people to work in all areas of the 2009 Festival. MIF Creative, the Festival’s creative learning programme, worked with over 2,500 local people and included four major commissions created in collaboration with local communities, schools or groups. Both the 2007 and 2009 Festival also featured local involvement in creative skills development workshops and arts education workshops with international and local artists.
Sustainability
MIF is committed to developing a festival which benefits the local economy, is engaging for local communities and which tries to minimise its environmental impact.
These principles guide all of our sustainable development activities, from ensuring our offices are welcoming and resource efficient; to sourcing and creating our productions responsibly and working with partner venues and suppliers to reduce the environmental impact of MIF events.
Some of our sustainable actions during MIF 2009 include:
- providing a range of opportunities for local people to engage with the Festival whatever their means. Approximately one third of the Festival’s programme was free, with a major free event every weekend and almost 80,000 people attended them.
- introducing compostable cutlery and tableware at the Festival Pavilion on Albert Square and composting as much food and packaging waste as possible (in partnership with local company TEG Environmental)
- supporting Foundation, a North West Climate Change Fund, with a donation towards local carbon reduction projects.
We are taking small but genuine steps forward and we know we have lots of room to improve. We are finalising our aims and objectives around sustainable development for the next festival and more information about these, along with our 2011 policy and guidelines will be available here in a few months.
In the meantime if you would like more information or to suggest ideas on how we could improve sustainability at the next Festival, we would love to hear from you: sustainability@mif.co.uk
