At the English Folk Dance and Song Society, we champion the folk arts at the heart of England’s rich and diverse cultural landscape.
If you are involved with the folk arts, we want to speak with you. How can we work together, combining our voices to achieve more than any of us could individually?
Our activities since summer 2020 have included:
- Addressing the particularly tough difficulties facing group dancing in this time of pandemic. We have been consulting widely, and supporting the campaigning of other organisations including One Dance UK, People Dancing and the EMDP.
- Lobbying government agencies including the Department of Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, HM Revenue & Customs, Chancellor of the Exchequer and more, working in partnership with other cultural umbrella bodies to highlight the plight of arts organisations and freelance arts workers.
- Supporting other organisations’ campaigns whenever they intersect with the interests of the folk sector.
- Protesting against the BBC’s axing of regional folk music shows and the marginalisation of the BBC Radio 2 Folk Show.
- Addressing important issues of equality, diversity and inclusion: listening carefully to people inside folk communities and beyond, and taking leadership to help facilitate positive change.
- Continuing our important lobbying on many other ongoing concerns of the folk community. This has included providing vocal opposition to attempts by white supremacists to appropriate folk dance for their own racist agenda.
Please support our activities if you can. Every 'like' on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter is a valuable endorsement of the messages which we need to share as widely as possible.
