The Coping Festival 2025 - Skating, Creating, Wellbeing

The Coping Festival is a family friendly, inclusive festival of action sports & creative action. The goal is to improve collective wellbeing by inspiring stories for brighter futures, raising awareness & funds for charities that benefit our collective wellbeing.

We collaborate with sponsors, volunteers and charities to raise funds, taking donations for activities based around C.A.R.E (connection, action, reflection & education). The festival is built by our community and gives all involved a strong sense of connection & purpose - while also being great fun!

With the help of our sponsors & partners, this year to keep the festival as inclusive as possible we have made the festival free, with an option to donate to The Coping CIC via this Go Fund Me. Any profits will be donated to charity as always. So far we have raised over £17,000 for charities providing support for mental health & wellbeing, in 2025 we are raising funds for two charities:

St Ann's Hospice - It's almost inevitable that terminal cancer will impact us in some way at some point, and it's brutal. St Ann's help meet the unique physical, emotional, social and spiritual needs of those with a life-limiting illness, and to help maintain their dignity. They provide specialist palliative care for people with cancer and non-cancer life-limiting illnesses, at all stages of their illness. St Ann's are building a new state of the art hospice and are fundraising for the project. The Coping founder Wil Hesketh has a personal link with this charity after his sister passed away in the hospice in 2024.

The Ben Raemers Foundation - Ben will go down as one of the finest skateboarders the UK has ever produced. Appearing consistently in magazines and releasing an enormous amount of footage across various projects. Ben died by suicide in 2019 and was the catalyst for the formation of The Coping. The Ben Raemers foundation do great work focused on preventing any more loss to suicide.

Live Like Ralph - is a charitable organisation set up in honour of Ralph Roberts, who sadly passed away on the 3rd of January 2021.

Ralph, amongst many other things, was a keen skater and creative. It is our mission to help support and maintain both of those communities so that they can continue to grow. We believe, as Ralph did, that by nurturing these communities, and all of the potential talent that lies within them, the positive impact they can have is extraordinary.