Where Your
Ticket Money Flows
On a Sunday morning in January, somewhere in the hills above Chiang Mai, a few hundred people will be queuing up to… wash their own plates. 🙂
Nobody makes them. There is a wash station, there is a queue, people chat in it. The plates came from temples down the road and every one of them goes back.
It is a small thing, and more or less the whole idea.
Gaia Beats was never meant to be a good weekend and nothing else.
Some of that is money for donations, some of it gets decided months out in deeply unglamorous conversations about cups and cutlery, and some of it is just who we make room for.
Here is all of it, including the parts that are still unfinished.
How
Gaia Beats Gives Back
Gaia Beats Festival runs as a not-for-profit social enterprise.
We commit 1% of total revenue to social and environmental projects in Northern Thailand from every edition, profitable or not. That includes 2026, when we invested heavily to grow the festival and did not turn a profit, and 2027, whether or not we break even. Once the festival is profitable we intend to give much more.
TOM CLARK
FOUNDER
The important word there is revenue. Not profit. Profit can quietly vanish in a hard year, and a hard year is exactly when the people at the other end still need the money. Revenue exists either way.
One percent is what we can promise while we are still building this thing. It is a floor, not a ceiling. Once Gaia Beats is genuinely profitable, much more goes the same way.
What We Have Given So Far
2025
the pop-up
Before any of this was a festival in the mountains, it was one day at Bloom Space in Chiang Mai for about 600 people. A pop-up, and honestly a test of whether the idea worked.
It cleared around 80,000 baht. We gave away half.
฿20,000
To FORRU, the Forest Restoration Research Unit at Chiang Mai University, for forest restoration.
฿20,000
To emergency relief for refugees and displaced people inside Myanmar, towards birthing kits for new mothers.
If you bought a ticket to that one day at Bloom Space, you were part of both gifts.
50%
of the pop-up’s roughly ฿80,000 surplus was given away. The other half stayed with the project to help build what became Gaia Beats.
Gaia Beats
2026
Our first three day festival. Sense Hot Spring in Mae On, camping for the first time, around 1,400 tickets scanned.
Investment
year
An investment year in the real sense: we put in the capital a festival needs to exist for the long term.
The
commitment
There was no profit. The commitment holds anyway, so 15,000 baht is committed for 2026 and is being honoured.
What Happens Next
That 15,000 goes out alongside 1% of 2027 revenue (or profit), to a Chiang Mai project working with children and young people. We will announce who as soon as it is signed.
The focus is deliberate: children and young people in Chiang Mai and Northern Thailand, across education, social and environmental work.
How we build a Conscious Festival
01
No single-use plastic is sold anywhere on site. Bring a cup you like, or pick up a metal one here.
02
Plates, bowls and cutlery are borrowed from local temples, with a donation in return. You wash your own. In 2025 and 2026 every single item came back, and we never took a deposit.
03
Food waste goes to a farm 6.9 km down the road and comes back as compost.
04
Free drinking water at seven refill points.
05
No hazardous waste at all in 2026.
06
Stages and structures get built out of reclaimed and upcycled materials. We called the theme for 2026 “Nothing New”.
2026 was the first year we properly measured our own water and electricity use, which is less exciting than it sounds and more useful than you would think.
That report is being finalised and will go up here.
Who Gets to Come
Children twelve and under come free.
Camping is included with your ticket.
Local restaurants had vendor space at zero-cost in 2026.
If the full price is out of reach, there is a ticket support application on this site.
Use it. That is what it is for.
We aim for at least half our artists to be Thai, and for a fully Thai management team in time. We are not there yet on either. We will keep saying so until we are.
We stand for peace.
We stand for dignity.
We stand for the basic worth of every human life.
Come and Be Part of It
Gaia Beats 2027 runs 22 to 24 January in the hills above Chiang Mai.
Every ticket carries a piece of the one percent, and the next thing it funds is a project for kids in the north.
Also, someone has to be in that queue washing plates. 😄