Worthy Causes
SUPPORTED CHARITIES
Supporting causes close to our heart has always been intrinsic to Glastonbury. And thanks to your support for the Festival, we’re thrilled to have been able to provide funding this year to a host of charitable organisations working with those facing challenges across the world.
By the end of 2025, we’ll have made payments of over £4.2m to more than 300 organisations spanning a huge range of causes: from international and humanitarian charities working in some of the world’s most challenging places, to organisations supporting biodiversity or operating at the forefront of the climate emergency.
We offered renewed support to humanitarian organisations working in areas of conflict and crisis, including charities working on a range of health initiatives and creative projects with women and girls such as Plan International’s Sudan emergency appeal, child.org’s maternal health work and Makani who work with women seeking sanctuary to overcome trauma.
We also supported Médecins Sans Frontières / Doctors Without Borders (MSF UK) with a donation of £100,000, specifically for their efforts across Sudan and to support their surgical hospital in Amman, which treats patients from across the Middle East including Syria, Yemen, Iraq, and Palestine.
In addition to the £4.2m of payments we have made to our supported causes this year, we’d also like to thank everyone who contributed to our Crowdfunder Prize Draw for the first 25 pairs of tickets for Glastonbury 2027, which raised a further £929,480 for MSF’s vital work providing medical care to people affected by the conflicts in Gaza and Sudan.
Joint Charities – Our Charity Partners
We continued to support our three incredible Joint Charity partners this year – Oxfam, WaterAid and Greenpeace – with more than £2m in donations and payments made in exchange for volunteering. We were pleased to support their work raising awareness of less-publicised campaigns, including Oxfam’s emergency response work in places such as Sudan and DRC, and Greenpeace’s Right to Protest campaign.
To read more about the Joint Charities and their work, please click here.
Other Charitable donations
In acknowledgement of the climate crisis we all continue to face, we are pleased to have been able to make donations to 25 environmental projects in the UK and overseas. These diverse initiatives include Heal Rewilding’s local projects and organisations bringing nature to urban areas such as Trees for Cities, as well as nature and wildlife conservation organisations including the RSPB, Wildfowl & Wetlands and other bee, butterfly and beaver conservation groups. We have supported charities working with our rivers and seas such as The Rivers Trust and Project Seagrass, and organisations focused on alleviating climate impact such as Onboard:Earth and Client Earth.
Closer to home, we are delighted to have made donations to over 40 local causes. These included local primary school enrichment projects, food initiatives – such as Food Forest Project – and local biodiversity organisations including the Somerset Wildlife Trust, Somerset Wildlands and Nature Buzz, as well as Shepton Mallet Community Woodland, who create accessible nature space for local people. We also funded Mendip Community Transport – who keep people connected to their local activities – and Somerset Community Foundation, who work across the county funding more than 400 local charities each year.
Many of the Festival’s wider community and crew are Bristol-based and this year we donated to various projects in the city, including St Paul’s Carnival, Bristol Refugee Rights, Young Bristol and Black2Nature who all compassionately support families, vulnerable and young people in the Bristol area with a range of initiatives. We worked with the Bristol & Weston Hospitals Charity to fund creative education for children receiving treatment in hospital, and collaborated with them on the Festival’s 2025 tote bag design – created by patients in the hospital.
Following on from our support for the NHS in Somerset in 2024, we are pleased to have been able to make significant donations to more hospital and healthcare charities this year – including British Heart Foundation, Teenage Cancer Trust and the Royal College of Nursing Foundation.
Volunteering and Services
We would also like to say a huge thank you to the incredible volunteers who donate their time to support over 200 charities while providing essential services to Glastonbury Festival such as stewarding and running our Property Lock Ups. We also continue our longstanding work with Festival Medical Services – a volunteer-run charity which supports health-related causes around the world – with their medical staff volunteering and running the Festival’s Medical Centre.
Festival Areas & Around the Site
The Volunteer Collective
Building on 2024’s successful pilot, this year the Festival’s Volunteer Collective welcomed over 100 volunteers from 9 organisations this year. The Collective provides opportunities to volunteer at the Festival for people who would not have access to it otherwise due to social, cultural, financial and accessibility barriers.
The programme – which sits alongside the Festival’s ED&I projects – covers all costs for the volunteers, providing clothing, camping equipment, travel and food costs, and ensures a structured programme with welfare and wellbeing provision, role-based training and dedicated support.
We’d like to thank the scheme’s participants for their hard work, and the charities taking part in the programme for all their support: Refugee Council, Young Bristol, Empire Fighting Chance, Trekstock, Diverse Artists Network, Children’s World, DeafZone, and Black Lives in Music.
Travel to and from the Festival for those in the programme was supported by our travel partners, Trainline and National Express. Charging banks and SIM cards were supplied to all participants by Vodafone, and ear plugs from Loop. Toiletries and suncream was provided by Green People, who also supplied free of charge suncream in dispensers across the Festival site. Food and snacks were donated by the Co-op, Tony’s Chocolonely and Clipper, and water bottles from Life Water. Festival boots, outerwear and apparel was donated by our partners Barbour and Adidas.
Period Dignity
We continue to provide free period products to all those in need at the Festival. For every product given away on site, we have donated an equal number to those living in poverty in the UK through the charity, Beauty Banks.
Areas at the Festival
Many of our areas across the Festival also support great causes through their crew and on site activities.
Block9 and NYC Downlow had a record-breaking year, raising £47,865 for charity partners Medical Aid for Palestinians, Freedom From Torture, Human Dignity Trust, Crisis, PrEPster and Choose Love’s Sudan Appeal.
Strummerville supported WAYOut Arts, The Avenues Youth Project and the Strummerville New Band Fund.
The Common remained dedicated to raising funds for Refugee Community Kitchen; while Theatre & Circus continued their ongoing support for Children’s World Charity.
Arcadia launched their own incredible charitable initiative this year – Build the Peace, working with collectives in post-conflict zones to transform the machinery of destruction into unifying art using art and music to bridge divides. The launch was showcased at the Festival with the co-creation of a mural which was projected onto the arena’s centre-piece Dragonfly installation.
Festival Partners
Together with Adidas we raised over £48,000 for Oxfam from sales of a limited-edition Glastonbury football shirt, donations of Adidas stock to Oxfam shops both on and off-site, as well as shirt lettering onsite.
In 2025, the Oxfam-Glastonbury-Tony’s Chocolonely partnership, selling special-edition Glastonbury Festival chocolate bars in Oxfam stores raised £62,000 for the charity.
Glastonbury Festival merchandise, donated to the Glastonbury High Street shop, raised £15,000 for the charity. On-site, the Oxfam festival shops made a record-breaking £149,000 of sales this year. £29,000 of this was raised from the sale of items donated by Barbour as part of the Reloved campaign which included 10 super re-loved classic jackets.
The sale of canned water and reusable Life Water bottles across the Festival site supports women-led initiatives via the Drop4Drop charity in South Sudan, providing clean drinking water to over 3,000 people.
Chilly’s raised funds for WaterAid by selling 500 custom printed limited edition bottles at the Festival.
Festival-goers who rented Vodafone charging packs contributed to the network provider’s ‘rent one – give one’ scheme. Vodafone’s Digital Inclusivity Pledge aims to help 100,000 people and businesses in Somerset access phone and data services by 2025, and as part of our ongoing partnership with Vodafone, their Everyone.Connected initiative has now supported over 70,000 people and businesses to cross the digital divide in the South West.
2024 Funding update – NHS donation
Last year we were thrilled to be able to support NHS Somerset with a substantial donation to Somerset NHS Charity. A large proportion of the donation is to be used to help build a brand new cancer and investigation suite that will support patients across the county. Work has been underway this year planning for the build, with location scoping and consultation.
Work has also begun to create an amazing new outdoor space adjacent to this, providing a calm and accessible outdoor space for patients, anxious relatives and NHS staff. The initial groundworks have been completed and landscaping of the therapeutic, green and decorative elements are now underway. There is currently no garden space available at Musgrove Hospital that is open to all, so this is a much needed project that will be widely appreciated.
Nearby, in Wells, the donation has been used to create a multidisciplinary Outpatients Centre which is now almost complete and due to open in January 2026. Through this, local populations will be able to access a wide range of services without having to travel to the larger hospital sites.
Planning, design and build has also begun on a range of mental health and therapeutic garden spaces across the region. This is a long term project that will benefit patients for many years to come.
