Breaking News: Illuminations Festival cancelled

The 2017 Illuminations Festival – originally planned for Saturday 17th June – has been cancelled by the organisers as not enough funding has been raised to allow the event to go ahead. The announcement was made over the weekend via Facebook and on the event website.

Association president David Saunders admitted that raising funds for the festival had always been difficult, but that this year a number of fundraising initiatives had failed to raise enough funding to allow the festival to go ahead. A crowdfunding campaign on the Pozible website had failed to raise more than ~12% of the target from local businesses and residents.

Here is the full statement from the organisers…

ILLUMINATIONS FESTIVAL CANCELLED

Unfortunately, the 2017 Illuminations Festival, originally scheduled for Saturday 17th June 2017, has been cancelled, as the organisers have been unable to raise sufficient funds and funding pledges.

“Despite our very best efforts, we are left with no alternative but to cancel the 2017 Illuminations Festival” advised the organising association president, David Saunders. “This would have been our fourth consecutive annual Festival”, he advised, “and based on our experience, we knew that raising sufficient funds was always going to be our biggest challenge. This year we decided to start our fund-raising efforts a lot earlier so that sponsors would gain maximum brand exposure, and we tried a few new initiatives, such as using a professional fund-raising organisation to supplement our volunteer efforts, trying to sell pole banner advertising to local businesses, and implementing a crowd-funding campaign (through Brisbane-based “Pozible”). Unfortunately, these efforts were either unsuccessful or fell way short of our target.”

“These events simply cannot survive without community support and participation. The local community was asked to assist with funding via crowdfunding, and in the end, less than a dozen people or businesses came on board”, said David.

The Illuminations Festival is run by an incorporated not-for-profit association, Wynnum Manly Events Incorporated. The organising committee are all local volunteers who put many hours of their own time into this event. “Our committee members are upset that it has come to this”, said David, “however we simply cannot continue forward from this point with insufficient funding pledges to cover our projected outgoings.”

“I would like to thank and gratefully acknowledge the unwavering support that we have received from our major sponsor, RE/MAX Advantage. I would also like to recognise the financial and logistical support that we have received from the Brisbane City Council, Think Tank Architects, Piccardi Legal, Cr Peter Cumming, Joan Pease MP, and many others. I also wish to thank my fellow members on the organising committee, including Dirk Pretorius, Akiko McDougall, Michael Jullyan, and David Bateson, who have put their lives on hold and given up many hours of their personal time to work on this event over the past three years. I also wish to thank the many other volunteers and supporters who have joined us on our journey, and also to thank those many local businesses who have supplied services in the past either free-of-charge or at-cost to help us meet our annual funding challenge”.

But it doesn’t end there. The committee members of Wynnum Manly Events Incorporated are planning a series of smaller niche events for the Wynnum Manly area, including a series of Laneway Festivals, an “Eat on the Street” dinner, and a Wynnum Jetty Dinner. Stay tuned for details, and check our web site at http://www.wynnummanlyevents.org/.

Here are some photos from previous festivals…