The Weekend (Woodfordia’s version)

Article written by Lucy Stokes

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The organisation behind it is best known for the Woodford Folk Festival, but Woodfordia is really a small civilisation that happens to throw a very large party once a year. The working bee itself did not begin at anything like its current scale; the way it grew tells you almost everything you need to know about how Woodfordia works.  

According to McBride, the organisation’s Citizenship, Volunteers and Department Heads Manager, the whole arrangement traces back to a single land-care group called the Treehuggers, who have been meeting on the last Sunday of the month for over three decades. More recently, a new land-care group was formed, known as Conservatree. Within this group, a single volunteer who claimed an overgrown bank known as Sleepy Hollow as her own and simply kept returning to it, month after month, until other volunteers began wanting a patch of their own too.  

Woodfordia now has four crews running in parallel every working bee weekend, and the Treehuggers are still the first of them: the land-care crew that started it all, doing the same steady work today that it always has.  

Conservatree, the newer land-care group, works alongside them, organised in ‘pods’, each tending to its own patch of the property, from Sleepy Hallow to the Sacred Forest to the section simply know as The Grande. 

Then there are the Warriors, who take on the site’s carpentry and infrastructure maintenance, including an entire hand-built bridge between two of the site’s venues.  

And finally, the Arteries are responsible for the festival decor and painted furniture that give the property its handmade charm, the same crew behind projects like lantern-making, which draws its own devoted following each working bee weekend.  

None of this structure was imposed from above so much as it accumulated, one returning volunteer at a time, each one modelling the behaviour for someone else. By evening, all four crews fold into the Folk Club, an open-mic gathering that functions less as an afterparty than as the actual point of the weekend.  

“It’s a gathering of the people,” as McBride puts it, “to celebrate music and our efforts for the day.” 

McBride is candid about why she believes this keeps working; word of mouth, she says, is the strongest and most powerful form of recruitment there is. Woodfordia relies on little else, trusting almost entirely in the compounding effect of a friend bringing a friend. That pattern is now visible in the numbers, more than 2,000 people took part in land-care working bees in 2025 alone. Somewhere between 10 and 20 percent of any given month’s volunteers are people who have never set foot on the site during festival season, having arrived instead through a friend’s recommendation or a chance encounter at Lake Gkula. It shows up just as clearly in the smaller, more anecdotal details, like the regulars who have gone so far as to buy camper vans specifically so as not to miss a single monthly working bee, forming what McBride, without much exaggeration, calls “a diehard bunch of folk” for whom this has become less an occasional act of goodwill than a fixed appointment they organise the rest of their calendar around.  

What makes Woodfordia worth holding up as an example isn’t the size of the crowd it pulls in, it’s the sheer range of work that crowd is trusted to do. Beyond the four crews and their monthly rhythm, Woodfordia runs more than fifteen separate annual projects to maintain the site and its infrastructure. It’s the kind of unglamorous, essential maintenance that most organisations pay contractors to do, and at Woodfordia it is, instead, one more thing the volunteers simply turn up for.  

Woodfordia’s biggest annual maintenance push, the Winter Warmer, draws volunteers each August for exactly this kind of site-wide care, the jobs too big or too infrastructure for a single monthly working bee to cover, and by McBride’s own account, it was one of the events that helped spur the ethos behind the Weekend in the first place. It is, in many ways, the clearest evidence yet that this isn’t a community that turns up occasionally when asked nicely; it’s one that treats the upkeep of a 500-acre site as a shared, standing responsibility.  

McBride’s own history at Woodfordia is, in essence, the same pattern playing out over two decades rather than two years. A festival volunteer coordinator originally from Ontario, she arrived in 2003 as a backpacker who had simply cold-called the festival office and offered her professional skills in exchange for nothing more specific than a chance to help, and she never really left, staying on in the way that so many of the volunteers she now manages have also stayed on, one season folding into the next until the distinction between visitor and custodian stopped being meaningful. Today she estimates that roughly four in five of Woodfordia’s current department heads arrived by an almost identical route, coming once, returning eventually finding themselves responsible for running the very operation they had once simply shown up to help with. A slow, largely unglamorous kind of momentum that has nonetheless been sufficient, over three decades, to put some 135,000 trees and plants into ground that was bare pine plantation when Woodfordia bought it in 1994.  

For anyone curious how that particular cycle tends to begin, there is a considerably lower-stakes entry point available right now: from 18 September to 6 October, Lake Gkula Camping is recruiting volunteers to help run the campground for a minimum of three days, in return for free camping and three meals a day, doing work that ranges from kitchen prep to lifesaving duty by the water.  

“It’s a pretty sweet deal,” McBride says. “All you have to do is bring your camping gear and be willing to do four to five hours a day of work.”  

It sounds, on paper, like a modest and self-contained commitment. Judging by almost everyone else’s experience of Woodfordia so far, it rarely stays that way.