Nature Festival

Background

Through our past decade of projects in the environmental sector, Hinterland identified a need to work on long-term coalition-building around the love of nature. 

We believe a positive, creative approach to shifting our cultural narrative around nature is one of the most important conservation activities we can undertake. We need to cut through politics and division by reminding people of the essence of what it means to be human in a more-than-human world.

We began with two years of experimentation, funding and supporting a variety of creative nature connection projects in South Australia through a project called Amongst It. 

The goal was two-fold: connect people individually to nature, and influence our cultural narrative and norms around nature. While these experiments were successful in connecting people to nature, we had little luck getting broad media or social media uptake. This led us to the idea of using a new Nature Festival to build density of activities and ‘make a moment’ to cut through the cultural narrative.

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Project

The Nature Festival is a collaborative, cross-sector systems-change project exploring our individual and societal relationships with nature. For the past several years, we have been exploring creative ways to build individual relationships to everyday nature and celebrate how important nature is to the identity of South Australia.

We believe a positive, creative approach to shifting our cultural narrative around nature is one of the most important conservation activities we can undertake. We aim to cut through politics and division by reminding people of the essence of what it means to be human in a more-than-human world.

Have a look a the promo and reflection for our very first nature festival in 2020, or check out the latest program at naturefestival.org.au

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Outcomes

366 events, 200+ partners, 21k+ participants

From a coalition perspective, we started with an astounding 90 partners in year one and have grown to over 200 actively engaged partners running events in year 3. Even more encouragingly, these partners are cross-sector, ranging from large institutions like the Art Gallery of SA to businesses like wineries, environmental organisations, volunteer groups, and individual artists. In 2022, this won us environmental sector's "Working Together Award."

In terms of our desire to shape the broader narrative, we’ve had over 500 mentions in mainstream media, a social media reach of half a million, and we’ve reached more than 20m impressions advertising love of nature in South Australia. 

Finally, we’ve had great feedback from festival hosts and participants:

• 89% of festival participants increased their sense of South Australian pride in nature,
• 76% of participants felt their own relationship with nature was deepened, and
• 77% were inspired to take positive action to care for nature as a result of the festival.