Seeds of hope: Homestead Park Festival 2025
This summer, we undertook an ambitious project – we put on a free festival for 8,500 people.
For two days in July 2025, we (alongside our event partner, Wild Rumpus) transformed Homestead Park into a magical, joyous, vibrant wonderland.
Homestead Park Festival: Here is Hope brought together artists, musicians, activists, craftspeople, thinkers, makers and doers to create an unforgettable weekend for the people of York.
Through play, connection, talks and workshops, the festival aimed to offer a much-needed infusion of hope: hope that a better and more beautiful future is possible, and hope that each of us has the power to help make it happen.
Probably because we work in a park, we’re especially fond of using nature as a metaphor. When our team were devising the festival, we kept finding ourselves talking about things like seeds, fertilisation, and growth. When describing what we wanted the festival to do, we used phrases such as encouraging “cross-pollination” of people and ideas, providing “fertile ground” for change, and “sowing seeds” of hope, joy, and action.
Sticking with these botanical metaphors, the festival could have been just a beautiful bunch of cut flowers - a lovely gift, but a fleeting one. The blooms can be enjoyed for a few days, then exist only in memory. A vase of flowers is lovely, but we wanted something more lasting, more alive.
Imagine instead that the festival was a wildflower seed bomb. After the initial act of releasing the seeds (holding the festival), the quiet work is now taking place underground. Each seed is finding its place in the rich soil, as blind, tenacious little white shoots stretch out beneath our feet, drawing up resources and forging new paths and connections. This is happening in the park, but the seeds have also travelled further, touching down across York and beyond. Soon, new shoots will begin to appear in all sorts of unexpected places.
Our hope, then and now, is that the festival’s outcomes will be numerous, diverse, and not wholly expected. We, along with our fellow festival-builders, have done the work of preparing the ground, enriching the soil, and releasing the seed bomb. Now, we wait to see what emerges with patience, tending to and protecting any seedlings that need support, and allowing what grows the space and resources it needs to flourish.
And what might grow? In the park, we’re already seeing some of these early shoots: new visitors drawn in by the festival, as well as new partnerships with artists, makers, and practitioners who are now leading events, workshops, and other happenings. We're also seeing seeds landing further afield - with groups across the North inspired by the ideas and connections sparked at the festival, coming together to create new projects that aim to realise the hopeful futures we tried to bring to life over one weekend in July.
The outcomes are emerging, and we hope they will continue to do so over the weeks, months, and years to come. If you’d like to follow the journey, we will be sharing some of those stories here on our website, and via our newsletter and social media channels.
Sophie Howard, Community Engagement Lead, Homestead Park, October 2025