Supporting communities in five UK Cities to develop their own Women of the World Festivals.
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Spirit awarded £722,708 to the Southbank Centre to bring their WOW (Women of the World) festivals to cities across the UK, supporting girls and young women to develop events in their communities and become catalysts for change.
The WOW festivals celebrate women and girls, bringing people together to for inspiring workshops, panel discussions and performances that inspire collective action towards a more gender equal world. Our award to the Southbank Centre was part of £2m of funding we invested in projects to celebrate the centenary of women’s suffrage as part of a programme called Spirit of Women, which included EmpowHER with UK Youth, a small grants programme with the Fawcett Society and Spirited, an exhibition showcasing lesser known stories from suffragette history.
The first regional WOW Festival was held in Bradford in 2016, with a further eight festivals held in Exeter, Perth, Norwich, Cardiff and Bradford again between 2016-18. The intention of the project was to explore how the WOW Festival model could be adapted as it moved outside of London: how could it retain what made the festivals successful, whilst gaining local ownership and celebrating what made each of the cities distinct?
Across the three years, the project trained 107 women in cultural leadership, and supported 68 young women and girls to volunteer as ‘WOWsers’, shaping the festivals themselves. 650 people took part as facilitators, artists and speakers, and more than 9,000 people attended the events.
InFocus explored the outcomes from Bradford WOW as part of their wider evaluation of Spirit of 2012’s grant-making.
The case study finds that there was real power in the combination of a locally rooted event that was connected to ‘something bigger’, as one attendee explained:
“I’m really excited that Bradford got chosen, the city often gets overlooked and it’s great to see an international brand come to Bradford while still having a real Bradford identify to it.” One of the key aspirations of the local organisers and volunteers of Bradford WOW was for it to reflective the diversity of the city, and be a space for integration. According to one volunteer, “people live in their own enclaves – white (British), Polish, Pakistani, and there is not much integration. This doesn’t mean there is hatred between communities but that people are living separate lives in separate rooms. For example, in schools children can all be from the same background and not mix with children from other backgrounds.”
A map depicting the connections that sprung from Bradford WOW lists over 40 new partnerships, networks and projects, including Speakers Corner, a youth-led collective that as of 2025 was still putting on events for local people nine years after the festival. The Young WOWzers in Bradford were keen to build on the momentum of WOW, as one explained “We didn’t want everything that happened during the festival to just fizzle out. We wanted that enthusiasm and excitement to continue. There are lot of people who really want to make Bradford a better place, and we need something like this to engage people from all sorts of backgrounds. That is where Speakers’ Corner grew from, as a project that can carry this enthusiasm on.”
Download Bradford WOW Case Study
In 2019, Women of the World set up as an independent organisation (The Wow Foundation), separate from the Southbank Centre, its home since the inaugural WOW in 2010. Spirit awarded an incubation grant of £20,000 to the WOW Foundation for WOW: What Now? which allowed them to:
Writing in 2025, as WOW Festivals celebrated their fifteenth birthday, Jude Kelly CBE explained, “The work at the heart of our mission – a gender equal world – remains as relevant today as ever and in some places across the world, more relevant and urgent than ever. We are incredibly grateful to Spirit of 2012 for your early trust and support as we set about building our presence as an independent charity.”
Alongside the project, WOW staff contributed to ‘From Moment to Movement’, a piece of action-research designed to identify the factors that helps events lead to longer lasting change, alongside Springboard and the Jo Cox Foundation.
New groups such as the Perth Women’s Collective, Badass Women of Cardiff and Speakers Corner in Bradford formed following the festivals
Individual stories from across the festivals demonstrate outcomes such as increased social connection, development of skills and increased sense of empowerment:
To mark the centenary of women’s suffrage, our EmpowHER programme, jointly funded with the #iwill Fund aims to develop and skill up young women and girls to use their voices for positive change – just as their predecessors did 100 years ago.
Working with the Scottish Government, our Sporting Equality Fund supported no fewer than 12 projects targeting women and girls to participate in sport and physical activity.
We supported the Jo Cox Foundation to explore community connection and social action through The Great Get Together.