Oxford's Christmas Light Festival 2020
In 2020 we will be bringing activity out from the city centre into the residential areas of our local oxford communities with creativity that spills out of people’s houses and streets.
Our words of inspiration for this year’s programme are: real life heroes, the light that moves us forward, build back better, green recovery, new beginnings, my community, being thankful.

We’ll be creating lots of resources to help people get involved and to help them make their street come alive over the weekend of 20 to 22 November 2020. There will be social media campaigns using the following hashtags, #bethelight #locallighttrail, #ourlightparty supporting individual households and streets to create that same sense of wonder with local trails and doorstep challenges that will enable everyone to take part but in a safe way.
We hope people will feel uplifted and inspired and that our communities will feel a sense of local pride in where they live and in their city.

The 2020 festival is being led by Oxford City Council on behalf of and with a consortium of partners: Fusion Arts, Film Oxford, OCM (Oxford Contemporary Music), AOFS (Arts at the Old Fire Station) and Tandem Arts Collective.
www.oxlightfest.com

The evaluative context for this year:
We have embarked on a journey in 2020 to radically change how the festival is delivered and how it is led. We would like our evaluation to begin to address the following questions:

• What has worked this year in terms of our ambition to enable communities and partners to take more ownership of the festival?
• How is the new leadership consortium developing the organisations involved?
• What is there still to explore in relation to alternate leadership models for a festival of this kind?
• How do we measure success and tell the story of the festival’s impact on participants and audiences?

It is expected that our evaluation of 2020 will provide the foundations for a funding bid to continue developing the leadership and delivery model of the festival so that we can do more to achieve our agreed aims, which are to:

• Ensure the festival reflects and engages more with grassroots organisations and communities
• Build a sustainable vision and organisational structure for the future of the festival (breaking the yearly fundraising cycle currently identified as a key challenge)
• Offer opportunities for genuine collaboration between key arts organisations in the leadership of the festival
• Establish the festival as a catalyst for change - place, space or state of mind (incorporating creative consultation within the festival programme)
• Create opportunities to experience inspiring art and to be creative
• Raise awareness of environmental issues and move the festival towards a more environmentally sustainable way of working

Freelance Contract Details
• From beginning of October 2020 until end-January 2021,
• To produce an evaluative report by end January 2021
• There is a fixed fee of up to £3,500 available for this work
• Christmas Light Festival takes place 20-22 November 2020 for which it is expected you will be available