SwN Vision
Singing with Nightingales was founded in 2015 since which we have had over ten thousand people visit our locations. It has become a staple part of many people’s calendars to return to our sites each spring to repeat this celebration of the return of life. The feedback we receive is second to none with many attendees often calling it one of the greatest nights of their lives. But our ambitions go far beyond just creating beautiful, transformative experiences. The SWN mission aims to build upon this impact to grow a diverse and inclusive community of nature appreciators and defenders.
THE SWN LEGACY AND VISON AHEAD
Collaboration is at the heart of our vision, be that locally with partners who support the growing and cooking of the healthy organic produce and drinks we serve, or with the national and international NGOs and projects who collaborate and partner with us throughout the season. We want to make sure this space is open to a diverse audience, particularly those with the least accessibility to such opportunities and who need nature the most.
Our vision over the next 5 years is to grow the scope of our artistic and environmental impact to make sure these sell-out shows aren’t only appreciated by the ones who can afford and have the means to access them but also by those whose socio-demographic status has historically excluded them from such opportunities. The expertise and skills within the team and our relationships with the land owners, the environmental, climate and nature stewardship sector alongside the wider community of stakeholders positions us to reach a very large audience in a highly impactful way.
SWN is at its heart a work of soft activism. It’s also a crucible in which new arts-based ideas can find expression and forge a more nature-empathetic form of activism.
Expand sites in the UK and abroad
Accessibility and inclusivity
Artist development and support
Over the coming years, SWN's ambition plan is to expand into multiple sites across the country and abroad. But alongside new sites, we intend to diversify our events into new models of delivery to open up the experience’s accessibility to low-income communities, disabled groups, and a wider range of ages and communities, especially those with protected characteristics.
SWN has proven a powerful tool for bringing the musical community into a place of deeper awareness of nature. This has encouraged us to prototype parallel artist development projects facilitating musicians into gaining a deeper understanding of the environment as well as the teachings of the natural world on-site with us. As the impact reveals what this work does for people, growing our capacity to build a deeper practice of nature-enriched nurture and a facility of support and guidance is essential.
Supporting the initiation of each guest onto their unique journey of personal and collective system change is our prime duty. The impact of SWN on our supporters, wider society and the natural world is the central responsibility of this experience’s purpose.
OUR IMPACT THROUGH ART & TRADITION
Art, culture and creativity thrive in nature-rich spaces. The natural world is the library in which our creative lineage was schooled. SWN celebrates our human cultural expressions as paramount to nature's own spectacles. In combination, they are arguably more glorious than the sum of their parts. Art and nature combined, nourish our sense of place, identity, indigeneity and compassion towards our wider global community.
Our creative booking policy is one that proudly leads in diversity and inclusivity welcoming musicians from disciplines found across the world, but especially those that have an association with Nightingales in their native culture, be they Sub-Saharan African, Ukrainian, Indian or Welsh. Our curation celebrates the need for art and culture, like Nightingales, to move freely.
We have very strict curatorial targets making sure over 60% of our 45+ programmed artists within our annual lineup identify as members of the BIPOC and LGBTQ+ community, as well as there being complete gender parity in our line-up. It is these artists and communities who statistically are most likely to be denied access to nature and who we want to prioritize in our programming.
REWILDING OUR AUDIENCES
Nightingales depend on a thriving intact ecosystem that includes humans. Their primary chosen habitats are those enhanced by us, not ones where we are absent or we have depleted. Nightingales need people and people (without always knowing it) need Nightingales. SWN is a celebration of this kinship, one not of preservation but conservation with people in mind. Our SWN sites tell this story perfectly: places where generations of people have stewarded the land to help maintain a thriving habitat evidenced by the plentitude of other species co-existing alongside our Nightingales.
Rewilding people is as much part of this project as the attention we raise of the state of nature in the UK today. Offering a chance for our guests to touch into their inner wildness and the permission to embrace aspects of our natural heritage that have been historically forbidden to us is our main driver.
We are confident no guest leaves without a renewed sense of our reciprocal dependence on nature and a stronger will for its defence and appreciation. Like all good land stewards, we make sure our events leave the land how we found it and where possible better and this is represented in how we welcome visitors and conduct our events.