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Impact
Written by Heidi Lenffer – Founder / Director of FEAT.
It’s 2024. You’re an arts and music festival operating during an escalating climate and biodiversity crisis. Bringing art to the fore, at a time when people need art and the connecting power of music and community more than ever. In other words, you are orchestrating gatherings of educated, open-hearted people, during a critical window of time where humans need to collaborate with courage and urgency. It would be hard to imagine a more receptive context for galvanising social change.
This is a moment calling for climate leadership from every person; not just the captains of industries, not just our Artists. As an Artist myself from the band Cloud Control, I started FEAT. (Future Energy Artists) in 2019 as an investment platform to accelerate Artist-led climate action. So many of my friends were already agitating for change that it wasn’t hard to empower them further to collectively invest in building renewable infrastructure like solar farms. Within 2 years of launching, our Artists helped bring a brilliant blue 35 megawatt solar farm to life in Western Wakka Wakka land in rural Queensland, big enough to power 11,300 homes for the next 30 years.
Since then my FEAT. team has been channeling these winds of change to transform the sustainable practice of the wider arts entertainment ecosystem and in 2021 we landed on a new impact model that works. It’s a sustainability surcharge on tickets – playfully called the ‘Solar Slice’– which sees an extra 1.5% or $1 built into the booking fee to fund science-backed emissions reduction and climate initiatives. The Solar Slice bakes environmental considerations into the DNA of event operations, by the simple fact that funding is carved out and earmarked from the start. Our team acts as the climate intelligence unit deploying these funds and leading the strategy so the impact wins are delivered without diverting the festival’s human resources and headspace.
We have successfully rolled the Solar Slice out across 100,000+ festival tickets, including Falls, Splendour in the Grass, St Jerome’s Laneway, Spin Off, and Harvest Rock – and achieved concrete outcomes across our 3 core impact pillars:
If the powers that be could match this funding it would unlock broader uptake and supercharge our industry’s impact into world-leading territory. The Solar Slice surcharge is a world-first initiative – we should be ambitious about claiming a leading industry position on the world’s entertainment stage not just for our talent but for our climate innovation.
As we head into 2024 against the backdrop of an increasingly chaotic climate system, it’s within the remit of every person reading this to properly come to terms with this fact: The world’s scientists have given us a 6-year timeline to cut 50% of human industry emissions to give us the best shot at a stable climate. Our ability to solve this complex social and political challenge will simply determine whether we have a long or a short future together on earth. What are you doing in your networks to move the dial?
This article has been written and published thanks to the generous support of Green Industries SA (GISA) as part of the Festival City Adelaide Climate Action Roadmap project, funded by GISA through its Lead-Educate-Assist-Promote (LEAP) grant program.
Written by Heidi Lenffer – Founder / Director of FEAT.
It’s 2024. You’re an arts and music festival operating during an escalating climate and biodiversity crisis. Bringing art to the fore, at a time when people need art and the connecting power of music and community more than ever. In other words, you are orchestrating gatherings of educated, open-hearted people, during a critical window of time where humans need to collaborate with courage and urgency. It would be hard to imagine a more receptive context for galvanising social change.
This is a moment calling for climate leadership from every person; not just the captains of industries, not just our Artists. As an Artist myself from the band Cloud Control, I started FEAT. (Future Energy Artists) in 2019 as an investment platform to accelerate Artist-led climate action. So many of my friends were already agitating for change that it wasn’t hard to empower them further to collectively invest in building renewable infrastructure like solar farms. Within 2 years of launching, our Artists helped bring a brilliant blue 35 megawatt solar farm to life in Western Wakka Wakka land in rural Queensland, big enough to power 11,300 homes for the next 30 years.
Since then my FEAT. team has been channeling these winds of change to transform the sustainable practice of the wider arts entertainment ecosystem and in 2021 we landed on a new impact model that works. It’s a sustainability surcharge on tickets – playfully called the ‘Solar Slice’– which sees an extra 1.5% or $1 built into the booking fee to fund science-backed emissions reduction and climate initiatives. The Solar Slice bakes environmental considerations into the DNA of event operations, by the simple fact that funding is carved out and earmarked from the start. Our team acts as the climate intelligence unit deploying these funds and leading the strategy so the impact wins are delivered without diverting the festival’s human resources and headspace.
We have successfully rolled the Solar Slice out across 100,000+ festival tickets, including Falls, Splendour in the Grass, St Jerome’s Laneway, Spin Off, and Harvest Rock – and achieved concrete outcomes across our 3 core impact pillars:
If the powers that be could match this funding it would unlock broader uptake and supercharge our industry’s impact into world-leading territory. The Solar Slice surcharge is a world-first initiative – we should be ambitious about claiming a leading industry position on the world’s entertainment stage not just for our talent but for our climate innovation.
As we head into 2024 against the backdrop of an increasingly chaotic climate system, it’s within the remit of every person reading this to properly come to terms with this fact: The world’s scientists have given us a 6-year timeline to cut 50% of human industry emissions to give us the best shot at a stable climate. Our ability to solve this complex social and political challenge will simply determine whether we have a long or a short future together on earth. What are you doing in your networks to move the dial?
This article has been written and published thanks to the generous support of Green Industries SA (GISA) as part of the Festival City Adelaide Climate Action Roadmap project, funded by GISA through its Lead-Educate-Assist-Promote (LEAP) grant program.
