Brainchild is the best festival I have ever been to. And no, I’m not just comparing it to my scratty teenage festivaling days at Scotland’s finest T in the Park (the T comes from the sponsor Tennants beer, ffs). I’ve been to some of the big dogs too, like Glastonbury, Reading and Outlook. But the reason why I like Brainchild so much is also why I kinda don’t even know if I should be writing this article. It’s just small and intelligent enough at present to feel special (and it's taking place this weekend).

A DIY-powered, volunteer-led music, arts and culture festival which blossomed out of south east London and found its way into a field in East Sussex, Brainchild has a non-wanky approach to creativity embedded in its makeup. This year they have names like Dazed 100 spoken word poet Caleb Femi, musician Kojey Radical, neo-soul babe Poppy Ajudha and up and coming DJ Ross From Friends taking to their stages. You could find yourself lost in a series of short films from Eye Want Change, see a dance troupe weaving their way through the site between acts, or discuss feminism with gal-dem.

Founded by Marina Blake while she was still a teenager, 2017 marks their five year anniversary and the biggest festival so far, with around 2,000 people expected to make their way from London (and elsewhere) to the field across the weekend. We spoke to Marina about how to build a successful arts and culture festival for the new generation.

START WHEN YOU’RE YOUNG

“I had a lot of time, energy and naivety at 19. I really wanted to do something that would celebrate what my peers were up to and bring about a change in conversation. People were engaging with social issues a lot, and taking their passions more seriously. It felt like a really exciting thing to make the most of, and I managed to plan Brainchild in my free time at university. Festivals are quite ingrained into our generation as something to do. I’d been to Glastonbury at 16 and fell in love with it. I realised it was a great format.”

DON’T BE AFRAID TO DO SOMETHING DIFFERENT

“I’ve never just wanted to make a ‘festival’. It’s about the ensemble. It’s about how everything connects. There can be the same energy in a DJ set as there is in a publication, as there is in an installation. This year we’ve got one of our producers to re-score a classic, weird, Soviet film with a DJ set. We’ve set up Cecilia Knapp, who’s a poet, and Laura Misch, a saxophonist, who're making something together. Bridget Minamore and I are working on a piece with Jeffrey Boakye, with author of Hold Tight – a new book on the history of grime music – where people walk into the space, get given a postcard, put on headphones and then Jeffery’s commentary with a playlist of his top ten tracks from the books will play. We’re also harking back to our DIY roots, with a new space for jams and short talks.”

THINK ABOUT DIVERSITY

“I think having a young, and not all-white team has made a difference in terms of the kinds of voices and conversations we have. It’s easy for festivals to be very safe. In the founding team there was diversity, not a huge amount of it, but there was. And now it’s something that we definitely look for. Especially with DJs. This year this guy Menelik’s been doing it and it’s 50/50 women, and there’s many people of colour playing too, which is really good. I’m happy about where it’s going and our level of consciousness about it now. I don’t know if there’s a lot on offer like Brainchild, in that respect.”

GET YOUR ETHICS RIGHT

“It’s always challenging, we’re 24-years-old now and everyone is either balancing this with full-time work or they’re poor and freelancing. It is a challenge. It wasn’t necessarily that we had enough awareness of any industry in particular to make a statement at the beginning that we were nonprofit, but we just wanted to do the thing and money was no object. And as we got older we defined ourselves by it. There’s a certain beauty to volunteering. When I look around at the site and I remember that no-one was paid to make any of it happen it is really breathtaking. It’s incredibly hard to quantify people’s time, energy and love. To run a non-commercial enterprise in today’s environment is not that common. We’ve also started to take sustainability more seriously. It’s always been a challenge with our budget, but this year we’ve really committed to it.”

MAKE CHANGE

“We’ve tried to come from a place this year of: we know there’s a problem, what solutions are there? For instance, we’ve got a panel called ‘What’s Next For Mental Health’. We wanted to look at what beyond talking about it can we actually do, what societal interventions can we make that are going to tackle the crisis we have in the crisis. Same with the housing crisis. What are we actually going to do about it? Are we going to leave the cities, are we going to set up co-ops? That’s what we’re exploring.”

IT DOESN'T HAVE TO KEEP GROWING

“I don't want it to get much bigger. If we continue to do the festival, I want it to be something that we know we can do really well, and that we know will sell. We can use it as a format and opportunity to celebrate what's going on the year round. That we do, and what the wider community is up to."

There's still time to get tickets for Brainchild 2017, here. Watch out for the @dazednews Brainchild takeover on Saturday and Sunday