The Lancaster Health Festival has one very simple aim: to create spaces and opportunities for people to have conversations – easy or difficult – with family, friends, neighbours, and with ourselves. We want these conversations to help us make simple changes that will have a big effect: rediscovering the art of living well. We feel this is more important than ever given the current pandemic and questions it raises around resilience.
So why aren’t we living as well as we could, given all the possibilities we have in society?
How is it possible to get out a message that we can make a significant difference to our health by making small changes to our lives?
The answer that we came up with, was to stop telling people that they need to change and start celebrating the fact that we can change.
And so, in October 2016, the seed of the health festival was planted, with the first festival taking place in September 2017 and engaging 500 people. The second festival took place in 2018 and engaged with 2,000 people. And in 2019, the third Lancaster Health Festival
engaged with almost 4,000 people. We hope for 2020 to build on this success, whilst experimenting with taking the art of living online and into people’s own homes.