POW Thanet has announced it is closing after its final event at Ellington Park in Ramsgate this weekend.
The POW (Power of Women) festival has been running for a decade but says the challenging funding climate, which has seen POW funds cut by 40% in just three years, has forced the decision to shut down.
In a statement organisers said: “We have made the difficult decision to close as a registered UK charity after ten years of community activism and creative programming.
“Due to the increasingly challenging funding climate, continuing the charity’s work has become unsustainable.
“We are going to take some time to figure out our next steps, including how we can be of service to our community going forward, but in the meantime, we hope you will join us for a final party at our free festival POW in the Park this Saturday in Ramsgate. We hope to see you there to close this chapter together.”
POW organisers say they are planning a legacy mural this summer in partnership with Rise Up Clean Up to leave POW’s mark on Thanet and are asking anyone who has benefited from POW over the years to donate to make the public artwork possible.
The statement continues: “As a charity committed to equality in all its forms, POW Thanet has led the way in the sector on fair pay for women and non-binary people, creatives and local suppliers, and campaigning for the rights of women and girls in Thanet and beyond through our ground-breaking creative content.
“Our mission is unfinished, and there is still so much work to do, but we have been doing this with less and less funding.
“Less than 2% of all charity funding goes to the women and girls sector (Rosa, 2024), which has hit POW hard. Overall, our funding has been cut by 40% in the last three years, and success rates for Trusts & Foundation applications have dropped to 0.5%.
“In the current economic climate, fundraising is a hard-won battle, and this is the case across the charity sector. Despite some funding success which enabled us to run this year’s festival programme, it has not been enough.
“We are very proud of the legacy that POW Thanet has created over the last decade as a grassroots movement. POW has evolved from a volunteer-led organisation to a registered charity with small grants from trusts, foundations and local authorities, seven experienced part-time staff members and 150 volunteers.
“In 2015, Christina Clark-McQuaid started POW with 20 women and a callout on Facebook. Ten years later, we have reached over 300,000 people through our International Women’s Day Festival, schools programme, youth mentoring and community outreach projects.”
The team say that: “In a time where gender inequalities, marginalisation and misogyny has never felt more terrifying, it is with heavy hearts that we make this decision.”
The team has thanked POW staff, volunteers, and trustees, past and present, as well as local press and media, trusts, foundations, business sponsors, donors, and those who have raised funds as well as other Thanet charities and community organisations
How you can give to the legacy mural
Tier 1: Community Champion – £50
For individuals, families, and small business supporters.
Your name will feature on our online thank you page.
Tier 2: Local Leader — £150
For small to mid-sized businesses or generous individuals.
The above, plus your name/business name featured at the mural site.
Tier 3: Future Visionary — £500+
For larger businesses, foundations, or philanthropic champions.
The above, plus your logo featured at the mural site.
Go woke, go broke strikes again. Guess the recent supreme court ruling of what a woman is, as opposed to theirs was the final blow.
“Go woke, go broke”? FFS. POW didn’t go broke because they were too radical—they went broke because they weren’t radical enough.
They started with a mission to fight for women and girls in Thanet—a place with sky-high domestic violence rates, generational poverty, and poor access to women’s health services- but ended up running breathwork circles for middle-class mums.
Meanwhile, grassroots women’s orgs doing the real graft—supporting survivors, migrant women, working-class girls—are scraping by on pennies, because less than 2% of UK charity funding goes to this sector. But sure, let’s pretend it was pronouns that took them down.
They started with a mission to fight for women & girls in Thanet & then let hairy ass men with beards & Adam’s Apples cosplay as women-the ultimate betrayal of women.
Good riddance, freeloading chancers happy to jump on any bandwagon if there’s someone elses cash involved. How many buildimgs did they try and get free space in? Then look at the total lack of any pride in the old Escape building when they had offices there, it just got ever more filthy and looked abandoned.
Though their crowning glory was the “citizen smith” style power to the people salute at the top of Athelstan Road. Which is even more ironic in that Athelstan is now pretty much under the control of the DFL crowd gentrifying it.