The University’s third annual Festival of Ideas is drawing to a close this weekend.

The festival, which aims to promote the arts, humanities and social sciences, kicked off on 20th October and will end this Sunday.

Events included a marathon reading of Wordsworth’s Prelude, which took place at the English Faculty this Tuesday, as well as speeches by Cambridge academics such as historian Linda Colley and eminent literary figures like Jacqueline Wilson.

Events are open to members of the University but crucially they aim to attract the general public.

Sophie Smith, who is Festivals and Outreach Officer at Community Affairs at the University department responsible for organising the festival, stated, “Our target is to attract over 8,000 visitors across these 180 events over 10 days”.

As Miss Smith explained, the project was set up to “redress the imbalance between public engagement in the sciences and the arts, humanities and social sciences. The Science Festival has been running for so many years and the feeling in the University was that it was time to celebrate all the amazing research and work that goes on in the arts, humanities and social sciences”.

Outreach is a major object. Miss Smith told Varsity that the “combination of family learning and adult learning events can lead to school pupils and others aspiring to study at the University, or a visitor of any age deciding to take a further education course or visit one of the University museums in future, to keep developing their interests”.

Thanks to Community Affairs team’s intensive fundraising activities most events are free of charge. Support is offered by Anglia Ruskin University and private donors whilst corporate sponsors include Cambridge University Press, Barclays Corporate, the Darwin Festival, and literary magazine Granta.

In addition to this, the project relies greatly on volunteers.

Miss Smith told Varsity that because many academics and other University members, as well as members of the public, offer their free time, the festival is “able to run an extensive programme with limited financial resources”.

The Community Affairs team operates a heavy publicity campaign in the run up to the festival. Approximately 20,000 programmes and flyers are distributed to schools, businesses, community groups and private individuals. This year, the Ideas in the Community programme ran taster sessions in three community centres across Cambridge before the festival began.

The scale of the project means that preparation has to begin shortly after the end of the previous festival. The effort required to coordinate the 70 participating University departments and external organisations is enormous.

“University departments are amazing,” Miss Smith said. “Everyone at the University sees the importance of engaging the public in their work and it is not that the departments need encouragement to participate, but instead support and that is what our team is there for.”

One attendee of this year’s festival commended the “fantastic variety of activities [and] talks of interest to young and old. We are from eight to seventy years old and enjoyed many things together,”

They also applauded, “family opportunities, friendliness, feeling of liveliness, and new ideas.”

Such high praise is typical. For Miss Smith, it is this public enthusiasm which makes it “an incredibly rewarding job to provide so many free events.”