Cultivating Resilience As a Boutique Festival: Lucidity Festival

Featured photo: Eric Allen

Organizing a boutique festival can be an exciting venture, offering a unique and intimate experience for attendees who desire a deeper, authentic experience. One of the most significant challenges in bringing such an event to life is often the financial aspect that organizers bear – a common occurrence in grassroots organizations. Limited resources and tight budgets can make the festival planning experience daunting, requiring ingenuity and quick thinking to persevere. In its 10th year, Lucidity Festival felt this challenge and ultimately was put in a position that will require community support and external resources to keep the festival flourishing. 

Lucidity Festival is an annual, three-day transformational festival in Santa Barbara, California that is described as a “values based community gathering.” This gathering is based off seven core values: participation and immersion in the artistic process, personal growth and global healing, awake and aware consciousness, social and environmental responsibility, family fun and creative play, communal reciprocity, and transparency. These values are what guide Lucidity into being a tool for transforming communities and igniting social transformation in the world. However, after dealing with several unforeseen issues during its 10th year, the community is looking outward for support to keep bringing these values into the world.

In keeping with its value of transparency, Lucidity openly shares where some of the issues arose which have led to the festival needing financial support:

Issues with Importing Materials 

Lucidity’s foundation for design is imported Guadua Bamboo from Colombia, which is considered one of the world's strongest, construction-grade bamboos. In the past, the team has successfully imported shipping containers of this bamboo from Colombia through Long Beach. This year, without their consent or knowing, this bamboo got rerouted to Houston where the team was unable to obtain it, and ultimately it racked costly demurrage fees. After seven months of the Lucidity team trying to reach a resolution, the only solution was to re-export it back to Colombia and order from a US-based supplier. As anyone could imagine, this added additional fees and stress to the situation that ended up costing Lucidity greatly.

Last Minute Operational Challenges 

Dealing with weather is something most festival organizers are no strangers to. Though Lucidity Festival has utilized the same lush venue for the entirety of its festival, this year was the first that the river running through the property made certain parts of the grounds inaccessible. Rather than canceling, Lucidity quickly pivoted to utilizing nearby grounds for parking, ensuring that the festival can continue. Ultimately, though, this change resulted in Lucidity having to order additional vehicles and shuttles to get guests to the festival grounds from the new parking lots.  

Lower Ticket Sales

As we are seeing as a trend for many festivals post-pandemic, Lucidity also felt a sting from lower ticket sales. However, for transformational festivals this is often something experienced on a deeper level because of so many co-creators being involved in the programming and operations of the festival who receive free tickets in exchange for their cooperation and sharing of talents. While a usual Lucidity year tops out at about 5000 tickets sold, with 3000 being paid tickets, this year there was about 2400 tickets sold. For a small boutique festival, 600 tickets does make a big impact on the bottom line.

Inflation

Another post-pandemic stressor on events is the increased cost of all areas of operation due to inflation. Lucidity saw upwards of 50%-75% increases in costs of production, materials, gas prices, and production services.

Now, even with all of these challenges and stressors, Lucidity is choosing to persevere rather than fold. While they have their work cut out for them to ensure they can bounce back, there is no doubt that they will. First and foremost, Lucidity acknowledges that there is a need to do a budget overhaul and investigate where they can trim costs down, at least for their next iteration, and consider doing as lean a production as possible. The team will also be surveying for new venues that offer less operational challenges but still allow for a growing capacity.  

Financially, Lucidity is tapping into their community members and asking for donations, largely through a GoFundMe campaign, which puts their value of communal reciprocity into play. The team will be looking into obtaining a SBA loan and recuperating funds from an insurance claim due to the severe weather that so heavily impacted their 10th year. And, after bootstrapping the festival operation since its inception, the team has decided to move forward with inviting investor dollars in for the first time, which they see as a necessary choice to ensure the festival can continue to scale and grow.

Lucidity is showing that it is possible to overcome financial and operational obstacles to create a successful, small boutique festival that leaves a lasting impression on both attendees and organizers. With so many unforeseen circumstances that can impact an event, it is important to always combat them with resilience and transparency. Community is the foundation of any festival, and Lucidity knows that their community is also what will help their festival continue to flourish. If you would like to contribute to keeping the Lucidity mission alive, you can find their GoFundme here.