The Greenaway Foundation is hosting the Greenaway Live music festival at Crawley Rugby Club this Saturday, with all ticket proceeds going towards a project that covers the cost of Christmas dinners for families struggling financially across Kent, Sussex and Surrey.
The charity provides families in those three counties with ingredients for a two-course Christmas dinner each festive season. It also runs a wish scheme for children from low-income families, delivering presents on Christmas Eve. Darren Greenaway, who founded the charity, said the Christmas project was ‘getting bigger and bigger, so this year we need to raise about £200,000‘.
What the Greenaway Live music festival involves
The event kicks off at 15:00 on Saturday at Crawley Rugby Club. Every act performing has agreed to donate their time, which Greenaway compared to a famous fundraising concert. ‘All the live acts are donating their time for free, so it’s a mini Live Aid,’ he said.
This is the second year of the festival. The first Greenaway Live took place in 2025, and Greenaway has said the planning for that edition was far from straightforward. ‘I was on my honeymoon trying to arrange it,’ he told the BBC. This year, the event will be streamed on the charity’s social media channels, broadening its reach beyond those who can attend in person.
‘This year we said we’d try again and obviously it seems to be getting more and more traction, so we’ve all now started planning towards next year,’ Greenaway added.
The scale of the charity’s festive support
The foundation expects to support over 1,000 families in 2026. The emotional weight of the work is something Greenaway described plainly: some parents, he said, would ‘break down and cry when we turn up and make the delivery’.
The charity’s reach has grown with help from a range of supporters. Waitrose & Partners East Grinstead made a £750 donation to the foundation as part of its Connections at Christmas campaign, according to The Greenaway Foundation’s LinkedIn page. That kind of backing from local businesses reflects the community-wide effort behind the charity’s annual push.
Last year’s fundraising also demonstrated what the organisation is capable of pulling together. According to the Greenaway Foundation’s own account of its 2025 Christmas appeal, the charity raised over £125,000. With the £200,000 target set for the current campaign, the foundation is aiming to go considerably further, and the music festival is central to that effort.
Tickets for Saturday’s Greenaway Live music festival are on sale now, with all proceeds directed to the charity’s work supporting families with the costs of Christmas.
