New Wave

New Wave is our youth engagement project that takes a small cohort of festival organisers through structured training focused on working with young adults to develop new, innovative Heritage Open Days events. It seeks to increase the number of young people involved in the festival as visitors and as organisers.

What are the goals of the project?

Over the years the festival has evolved from just opening doors to encompassing a wide range of innovative and dynamic events. However, too often we’re still perceived as only being for traditional heritage audiences. Our data shows that this is still the case, as young people under the age of 35 are significantly under-represented across the festival (both as visitors and festival event organisers). New Wave seeks to change this by putting young people in the driving seat as active decision makers at festival events to help us reach new audiences. Our primary goals are:

For young people to feel that the festival is for them
For young people to have access to a programme of free dynamic events across England
For young people to be well-represented in our visitor demographics
For young people to be well-represented as event organisers

Since 2020 we've been supporting sites to collaborate with local young people to help reach these goals. We plan to continue growing our work in this area as it has been a hugely popular offer among the festival community.

What have we got planned for 2025?

We’re doing things a bit differently this year to give us space to grow New Wave. We won't be running our usual training programme, instead we’ll be focusing on publishing resources for the whole community to use, connecting with previous participants, and redeveloping our programme to maximise impact and increase the number of young people involved in the festival as organisers and visitors. To keep up to date with developments and upcoming opportunities, join our newsletter or become a part of the community.

What guides our approach to working with young people?

New Wave is guided by three key themes:

Learning from others - we encourage a collaborative and cross-sector approach to engaging young people. New Wave aims to learn from and build upon the previous work that has been done in this area.
Understanding our audience - New Wave focuses heavily on utilising audience data to inform and guide our work. The project aims to build an in-depth understanding of the motivations, aspirations, and barriers when it comes to youth engagement in the cultural sector.
Co-creation and collaboration - New Wave is about producing events by working directly with young adults. We focus on using co-production to plan, promote, and deliver events for younger audiences.

What did we get up to in previous years?

From 2020 to 2024, participating organisers received funding to put on events, and got specialist guidance and support from guest speakers, for example, the Imperial War Museums, the Tate, the Audience Agency, Kids in Museums, Historic England, Decision House, Y Heritage Leicester YMCA, and Chloé Nelkin Consulting all spoke previously. Building on these training sessions participants conducted their own local research and engaged local young people collaboratively to create new events at their sites. From these learnings, new connections and partnerships were formed and a whole host of exciting events were put together.

I loved it. It was a brilliant push for our org to co-create with young people which is something we've wanted to do for a long time, with the support of a programme and funding to do it. We will do more of this going forward off the back of participating in the programme

Event Organiser

New Wave 2024

It was amazing - so nice to do things in a small group setting (especially the in-person session) so that we could get to know one another. Super supportive and responsive team and I will be recommending the programme to others.

Event Organiser

New Wave 2022

Informative and empowering

Event Organiser

New Wave 2023

I loved it- for me it was my first time applying for any kind of funding and my first opportunity to oversee a project! It was super welcoming and beginner-friendly, I learned things that I can definitely take forward for the future when planning more events!

Event Organiser

New Wave 2023

Thank you, this has been one of the best training programmes I've been part of - the support given was phenomenal and I felt like I could reach out at any time!

Event Organiser

New Wave 2024

Event examples

Past participants have created a range of innovative events including interactive workshops, escape rooms, museum lates, outdoor cinemas, and all sorts of quirky pop-ups.