Festival Sponsors 2025
We’re delighted with the strong support that we get from businesses and organisations across the whole community, within Orkney and further afield. We’re currently updating this page to highlight existing and new partners.
Core sponsors
Orkney Islands Council has been a core supporter of the Festival since its very first days in 1991. The Council provides funding and support in many ways, with staff in various departments making a big effort to help with schools links, licensing arrangements, street closures, publicity, communication links, Family Day activities – in fact just about every department of the Council is involved, coming up with support, ideas and solutions.
The Scottish Government has a strong commitment to promoting science and technology, and provides support for many initiatives communicating and highlighting these areas to the wider community. It has supported the Festival for many years, making it possible to develop specific areas for the longer term, from school activities and the Family Day to core development.
Gigawatt sponsors
The Highlands & Islands Climate Hub supports communities throughout the north to take action on climate change. It can be action to reduce emissions or adapt to the changing world, and it can be anywhere in the Highlands or Orkney and Shetland. Communities come up with varied activities – there are community food gardens and community recycling hubs, beach cleans with gathering data about the pattern of marine litter; action to reduce food waste or clothing going to landfill; tree planting and woodland care. The Climate Hubs are a Scottish Government initiative, with over 20 spread out across Scotland.
Megawatt sponsors
The Institute of Physics (IOP) promotes physics to all. Its members work in many settings – there are teachers and researchers, apprentices and technicians, engineers and product developers. It seeks to bring people together in a common fascination with the world around them, and to bring down barriers that might prevent young people in particular from exploring the subject. It also aims to give physicists a voice in the big debates of our time, and aims to be a place where anyone interested in physics can come to find something to interest and amaze them.
Culture Ireland supports Irish artists to present and promote their work at strategic international festivals and venues. It also works to build relationships and networks to advance the global impact of Irish artists. It supported a visit of Irish musicians to the 2018 Festival and is funding this year’s participation by the poet Chandrika Narayanan-Mohan.
Orkney Islands Council’s Nordic Atlantic Fund has been established to enable cooperation across the North Atlantic and to create opportunities for collaboration on projects with shared interests that will make the North Atlantic a better place to live. It has provided funding for the North Ronaldsay Trust to organise the Island Sheep and Island Futures events.
Kilowatt sponsors
Firstdrive Cars, which is supporting the visit of the Mearns Singers, started in Stonehaven in 1995 as a small one-man operation, and has grown steadily to larger, upgraded premises. It has the full range of servicing and repairs, including vehicle diagnostics and repairing electrical faults. It recycles everything it replaces on a car, including around 1000 tyres a year.
Support for the choir’s visit is coming too from the ingredients manufacturer Macphie. The company was founded in Glasgow in 1928 as a baking wholesaler and after moving in 1973 to Glenbervie, near Stonehaven, it gradually developed into an internationally-renowned supplier of ingredients, from cake mixes and desserts to sweet and savoury sauces.
Also providing assistance for the choir is the Rotary Club of Stonehaven, one of the oldest in the North-East of Scotland. It has around 40 members, all active in the Club’s many projects and events locally, nationally and overseas. This year’s activities have ranged from support to the Stonehaven Land Train to repainting the gazebo at Kincardine Community Hospital
Kincardine Rotary Club are located not in the familiar Fife town on the north shore of the Firth of Forth, but in its namesake town in Ontario, Canada. It’s on the shores of Lake Huron and was originally called after the Penetangore River, at whose mouth it stands. The Club keeps up its links with Scotland and is also backing the Mearns’ Singers’ visit.
The Hinrichsen Foundation, which is supporting The Voyage of the Fox, is a charity mainly devoted to the promotion of new music. It was founded in 1976 to continue the tradition established by the Hinrichsen family as the proprietors of the music publishers Edition Peters, established more than 200 years ago in the German city of Lepizig.
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The Cockaigne Fund, administered by Foundation Scotland, supports boundary-pushing musical research, development, and performances to delight, inform, and move participants and audiences alike. The Fund supports creative, challenging, and original projects that explore cultures and traditions, past and present, and particularly those linked to history.
NorthLink Ferries provide services up to three times a day across the Pentland Firth between Scrabster and Stromness, passing the Old Man of Hoy, and with the option of a cabin and breakfast aboard ship for the early morning sailing from Stromness. They also provide several return journeys a week between Kirkwall and Aberdeen, and onward links by sea to Shetland.
Pentland Ferries operate on the Short Sea Route between Gills Bay in Caithness and the Orkney port of St Margaret’s Hope in South Ronaldsay, with three return sailings a day. The route passes the islands of Stroma and Swona, with views of sea cliffs and tidal eddies, and the onward journey by road between St Margaret’s Hope and Kirkwall crosses the Churchill Barriers.
The Orkney Creamery at Crantit Dairy is Orkney’s main milk producer, supplying households, shops and supermarkets throughout the country – and ever since 1995 it’s also been producing Orkney Ice Cream. Flavours range from Raspberry and Strawberry to Rhubarb & Custard and Toffee & Orkney Fudge, and a string of award have included Best Artisan Ice Cream in the UK.
Edinburgh Remakery is an award-winning social enterprise promoting a culture of repair and reuse. Its staff teach the skills – and also apply them to get your laptop or computer back in action. They also mend or alter clothing. They take in old electronic devices to repair and refurbish and pass on for reuse. Anything they can’t get back into working order is broken up for spares, and it all cuts down on waste going to landfill.