Buddha Birthday Festival
2018 South Bank Parklands, Brisbane
VISION
The Buddha Birthday Festival in Brisbane is the largest annual celebration of Buddha’s birthday in the world and is in it’s 21st year. The vision is to showcase Buddhist and Asian culture to the entire community over 3 days in early May in a celebratory format.
STRATEGY + EXECUTION
The festival is held in South Bank in Brisbane and features 30 food vendors, 20 workshops and lessons (in everything from drumming to meditation), 2 major performance stages and lighting of major Brisbane bridges. The event involves around 300 performers and approximately 1000 volunteers – plus, a grand finale fireworks display on the Brisbane River.
Our role has been to provide the management of all operations and production for this festival and with approximately 200,000 people attending over the three days this is one of Brisbane’s biggest annual festivals. We also work closely with the host venue (South Bank Parklands) to ensure the event install doesn’t have any negative impacts on their permanent retailers.
Over the last few years we have been helping turn the festival climate friendly with examining ways to lower the festival carbon footprint. This has seen a change in lighting 2000 lanterns, environmentally friendly packaging and examining how to monitor every visitors ecological impact.
RESULT
As the event has grown our services continue to help the Buddha’s Light International Association of QLD (BLIAQ) to curate a festival that is still core to their beliefs. Tom Thumb Events began managing this festival in 2010 and has just been retained for another 3 years to continue our services for this amazing festival.
“Chris Bierton and his team have made our lives easy. It was so stressful for the committee, who are mostly volunteers, to organise the festival every year. Now we just sit back and enjoy the finished product.” Peter Cheung, Secretary of the BLIAQ.