Drum roll… Take One Action is moving to a biannual festival model! Our director Rachel Hamada explains why:

“The only lasting truth is Change,” wrote legendary writer and thinker Octavia Butler in her prescient book about possible futures, Parable of the Sower. 

To do the best possible work, organisations must evolve with, and adapt to, changing times – and Take One Action is no exception. Set up in 2008 as a film festival designed to nurture the conversations and questions at the heart of positive social change; encourage the communal exploration of complex social and political topics; and – above all – to inspire action and generate positive change in the world, many of our core principles have remained consistent. However, the world around us has changed and new and innovative ways of working have emerged. 

This has created a number of challenges for us, but also lots of exciting opportunities and questions: namely, how to decentralise and democratise our programming practices; diversify our audiences; make positive social change irresistible for an increasingly online and polarised world; place collaborations with grassroots and community-led movements at the heart of our activities; and centre wellbeing and fair work in our own organisation.

These priorities mean that, for us and our future, the best approach is to move from an annual to a biannual film festival model. This means that we won’t be holding a festival this year, but never fear! We will continue to carry out an exciting programme year-round screenings and events (for example, we are running events across Scotland in the next few months on topics as diverse as fast fashion, industrial fish farming, toxic masculinity, climate change in the global far North, and music as resistance – keep your eyes peeled on our website and socials for more details). 

Going forward, we will hold film festivals across Edinburgh, Glasgow, Dundee, Aberdeen and Inverness every second year in September/October that consist of a core programme of powerful global stories of change alongside local strands of screenings and workshops that we’ll co-create and produce in partnership with local grassroots and community organisations. We will prioritise working with organisations and groups that are led by/work with underserved communities and audiences, whilst remaining committed to increasing our access provision across our activities.

Our focus for the rest of 2024 is Collaboration, and we are using this valuable time to build new and strengthen existing relationships with partners across Scotland.

How did we arrive at this decision?

As we expanded our team this spring (read more about us here!) we took some time out from our day-to-day activities to do some deep thinking and working around what our future as an organisation in the world – and as the humans who make up that organisation – could and should look like. From this, we solidified a theory of change, a mini manifesto and a strategy for the next four years to guide our actions. As an organisation with limited resources, it is crucial for us to be focussed and intentional about our plans.

The mini manifesto that we co-created as a team details our key commitments to our work over the coming years:

• We bring communities together to harness the transformative potential of film and storytelling for collective change.
• We bridge film and social action to build power, imagination and active hope.
• We centre stories from people affected by oppressive systems, who are growing new worlds.
• We collaborate to create playful and radical encounters with film and art to inspire action for a better future.
• We work to remove barriers to access and engagement across all our activities.
• We follow fair work principles, within our own organisation and with collaborators and partners, and prioritise rest, care and wellbeing.

Get involved!

We’re also planning to launch a membership programme early in 2025 (if you’d like to feed into what this could look like, please fill in our short survey), which will also be a festival year. We’d love to hear from anyone interested in collaborating with us, including other organisations working on principles of fair work and wellbeing, and you can keep up to date with our activities and ways to get involved by signing up to our newsletter here, and by following us on Instagram.