24 October sometimes feels like a long way off – here’s a guest post from Laurence and Alison Matthews about a fun and creative initiative they did in their town to spread the word and start building momentum towards 24 October:
The Hay Festival of Literature attracts something like 80,000 people each year to the normally quiet town of Hay on the England-Wales border. This year, we have have been running a ‘350’ competition for children during the festival, with posters in shop windows around the town. There were 35 posters in all, each with the 350 logo and a different climate-related quotation – the aim was for children to find as many posters as they could, and to write down the word in bold font from each poster (and, as a tie-breaker, make sentences from the words collected). The competition had benefits for different groups of people:
– the children had some fun;
– the shop-keepers liked the idea, which encouraged festival visitors to go into the town;
– and for the 350 campaign, we got to display the logo and some brief information about 350 at many places around the town, where they’d be seen by some of the 80,000 visitors to the festival.
We’re hoping of course that some of these visitors will be motivated to get involved in events in October back in their home towns. And in the meantime, quite a lot of people in Hay at least have now heard of 350 and we’re hoping to organize something in Hay ourselves for Oct 24.