Kambe Events, the company behind UK Festival Awards 2025 Independent Festival of the Year, Shambala, is transitioning to employee ownership.
The move sees the festival’s original co-founders step away from ownership, ceding the business to the team members who have helped build it over more than two decades.
The transition will see Shambala owned by an Employee Ownership Trust (EOT), which the team hopes will “ensure that the festival will remain independent, and that its team will share in future successes.”
“All of us at Shambala have an emotional stake in what we have built over 25 years; now everyone has an ownership stake too,” explained Co-Founder and MD, Chris Johnson. “We would be nothing without our people, and they deserve to carry on the Shambala legacy as beneficiaries.”
“It is patently clear that the current capitalist model is fundamentally broken,” added Dan Raffety, Head of Music and another of the festival’s Co-Founders, who has led Kambe’s transition to EO. “As a society we must explore alternative models of ownership as a way through which the massive power and potential of capitalism can be focused on serving humanity and the planet at large.”
More information on Shambala is available here.
