Charity partners announced for Lytham Festival

Some Local charities are set to benefit from this year's Lytham Festival.

Five charity partners from across the North-West are to benefit from this year’s Lytham Festival. The region’s largest music festival returns for five nights of live music on Lytham Green from Wednesday June 28 to Sunday July 02.

Each year charities are invited to apply to be a partner and this year more charities than ever applied with 68 submissions.

The charities selected and the nights they will partner with are:

• Mary O’Gara Foundation - Jamiroquai - June 28
• Park View 4U - George Ezra - June 29
• Lytham Rotary - Sting - June 30
• Trinity Hospice - Lionel Richie - July 01
• North West Blood Bikes - Def Leppard and Mötley Crüe - July 02

The 5 day festival begins on Wednesday 28th June and runs until Sunday 2nd July. 

For 2023 Lytham Festival has chosen to support relatively small North-West based charities who make a big impact in the communities they serve.

The Preston-based Mary O’Gara Foundation was set up in memory of 27-year-old Mary who took her own life and is dedicated to the prevention of suicide in young people by providing free training sessions to all schools, colleges and any other organisations working with young people to give them the skill set to spot and support someone in crisis. Trinity Hospice is the local hospice for Blackpool, Fylde and Wyre and combined with Brian House Children’s Hospice it provides help and support for more than 8,000 local people each year. North West Blood Bikes provide a totally free, voluntary service, out of normal working hours for the transportation of urgent and emergency items including blood, platelets and donor breast milk solely for the benefit of the emergency services and NHS hospitals.

And two Lytham-based charities have also been selected. Park View 4U provides a community recreational facility at the QEII Park View Playing Fields. It is one of the busiest parks on the Fylde coast and is 100% reliant on grants and donations for ongoing maintenance, repairs and running costs of the park and it's play facilities. While Lytham Rotary, which celebrates its 75th anniversary this year, continually identifies charities and communities in need international, nationally and locally and in the last 10 years has donated almost £200,000 to charities and organisations.

The charities were chosen following an application process and those that have been selected will be given the opportunity to have a team of fundraisers on site at Lytham Festival collecting monetary donations.

Festival director Peter Taylor said: “Selecting the charity partners for this year’s Lytham Festival has been more difficult than ever before as we were inundated with applications. All were from incredible organisations that do so much for their chosen communities.

“We are delighted to reveal we have selected five charities that we believe have an impact both to our local Lytham community as well as the wider North West, and we encourage our festival audience to support them.

“Not only does this provide the charities with a great opportunity to raise much needed funds, it also puts them in front of an audience of tens of thousands of people so they can raise their profile.”

An extended Lytham Festival in 2022 saw 10 charities benefit from a total of £22,549 and since it’s inception in 2010 charity partners at the festival have received more than £100,000 in donations.

And all five charities selected to be part of the 2023 festival are delighted.