Where did the idea come from? Who is behind L Fest? Find out more...
“Hello and welcome to the World of L Fest. The past five years has been an exciting journey for myself and L Fest. I am constantly learning and adapting L Fest with new ideas. I always try to say yes to your requests to make the festival bigger and better year on year.”
L Fest has developed with passion and drive of Festival Director Cindy Edwards. Back in 2010 Cindy was running an event she co organised, Stanstock 7's women's football tournament for 400 women. She saw the amazing atmosphere she had helped to create at Stanstock and started L Fest; that back then was "a multi sports weekend for women who liked women"! L Fest grew and grew as Cindy met more people wanting to get involved and believed in L Fest in the same way she did. Even before the first festival L Fest had grown from a multi sports event to a music, arts and comedy festival with its own cinema as SpringOut, The Rainbow Film Festival, Laughing Cows Comedy and many other individuals brought in their valuable contributions to the festival. Cindy is the only full time member of staff, helped by volunteers who are vital to programming different areas of the festival.
From the start of just one event, L Fest now runs 3 international events, the L Fest awards and the L Fest Foundation all creating The World of L Fest.
L Fest has won many national and international awards for Best lesbian event & Best Festival and Cindy has been nominated in the National diversity awards and won Barclay's Innovator of the Year for L Fest in the G3 Awards.
Cindy was interviewed last year as part of a global telesummit of women living their life out and proud; http://www.liveyourbestlesbianlife.com
This interview tells you all about L Fest and how it started. Watch the video and hear Cindy's views, passions and future prospects for L Fest.
Below a radio interview in March 2015 with Out in Brighton:
On one boardroom meeting day, Vanessa from Thinking Visually came and 'drew' our meeting. I had never met Vanessa and she knew nothing about L Fest, she was recommended by Sue & Sal from SpringOut. We just sat around the boardroom table talking about what L Fest was to us. At the end of the day Vanessa had drawn The World of L Fest, I think its fantastic and this sums it all up.
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Five years later we asked Vanesa back to talk to ticket holders.. We set up a series of questions at L Festive 2016. The combination of below is why L Fest is important to so many.
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