Thank you for publicly making comments about Camp Creative. We are proud of our public profile and this forum gives us the opportunity to provide information that may be new to you.

Camp Creative is a local event that has been run by local people in Bellingen for nearly 20 years. Since 2000, Bellingen High School, Bellingen Primary School and most of the town’s halls have hosted five days of courses, with an average of 1,000 campers per year.

The camp is managed by a volunteer committee of local community members, many of whom over the years have also been known for their other significant contributions to the Bellingen community across many areas as well at the creative arts.

The free ‘Party in the Park’ is the camp’s way of saying thank you to the people of Bellingen for being so welcoming to the event. Hence, we make sure we use local food stalls as much as possible. This year, of the six food trucks, two were Bellingen-based, two were  from North Beach and one from Valla. The sixth, a ‘non-local’, was a recommendation from the Bellingen Markets for fast and quality food. We are hopeful that local business Kombu will be part of the event in 2020.

At the high school our coffee vendor is Amelia Franklin. The lunch options are either a local caterer or the school café, who give all proceeds back to the school. Campers in town walk to the main street to eat at local cafes and restaurants.

We make every effort to promote local retailers before and during Camp Creative. This includes a personal visit by Michelle Stockton, Camp Creative Co-ordinator. We visited The Little Red Kitchen in 2018, and we promoted it extensively in our brochures and online.

At the camp venues we displayed A3 posters listing all the Bellingen cafés and restaurants and their opening hours every day.

We have also worked closely with the Chamber of Commerce to encourage local businesses to be responsive to the influx of visitors. A letter was sent to all outlets encouraging their participation.

We appreciated that your business was one of the first to open on Sunday night, when many campers arrive looking for a quick meal. In the past the demand has been such that Alice and Graeme had to take the phone off the hook to keep up with demand.

We also appreciate the quality functions run by the Butter Factory for our Sunday Welcome Night dinner, and the Bellingen Country Club’s meals and drinks for the camp’s Wednesday open mic music night.

The demand on local accommodation is such that many campers find most Bellingen providers booked out before December.

Finally, we are at all times conscious of being an integral part of the community. We don’t just provide a festival. We use local businesses for almost all our operational needs. Our website was designed and is maintained by a local company. We use a local graphic designer and printer. Each year campers purchase a large volume of art supplies from a local art store. Nearly 40 per cent of our tutors are locals. We pay a group of 12 young people from the high school for a week to act as Camp Guides and employ local event co-ordinators to run the camp.

We donate $20,0000 per year under our creative funding program to support local initiatives such as the Readers & Writers Festival, the Bellingen Youth Orchestra and Urunga Public School’s music program.

We would like to take this opportunity to thank the Bellingen community for another wonderful Camp Creative. Why would you live anywhere else?

Regards

Rob and Michelle Stockton

Camp Creative Coordinators

(This letter was done in collaboration with the Camp Creative committee)

Published Courier-Sun, Jan 23 – ‘Feed local’

As a struggling local restaurant owner, I was appalled to hear that around five food vans were brought in to Bellingen for an event organised by Camp Creative. We held out for customers that night, but closed our doors around 7.30. 

Speaking to other café and restaurant owners, times have been tough, and the summer – and Camp Creative –  not as busy as everyone anticipated for us. Losing a night of what should have been decent trading was devastating.

We are losing the wonderful Popla Restaurant – they are closing at the end of the month.  They were also instrumental in providing frozen meals to the Neighbourhood Centre for disadvantaged people.  I am sure they will be missed by our community.

Unfortunately my restaurant – the Little Red Kitchen – will also be closing, at the end of February. Despite having wonderful, supportive regular customers, and extremely happy visitors to the restaurant, the small pool of people in this lovely town is not enough to allow us to break even, given the ridiculously high overheads I have to pay.

I am begging people who organise events and festivals in Bellingen not to bring in outside food providers into a small town with more beautiful eateries than it can really cope with. It does not allow visitors the true ‘taste’ of our town and local produce, and it hurts the established businesses.

When I first came to this lovely town four years ago, I got involved with a local festival. I was told the local businesses were not supportive of the festival, and found out that they had been bringing in an outside coffee/food van and parking it at the park across from one of our local coffee shops!  Believe me, business owners of this town will support events and festivals in this town, if they are feeling supported in return.  I don’t know the people who organise Camp Creative, and not sure if they are even from Bellingen, but it seems like a terrible thing to do to the struggling businesses in our town.  I hope they will reconsider this in the future.

Vicki Bridgstock

Little Red Kitchen Bellingen