Our work on regional Australian festivals has demonstrated the complex and competing roles attributed to regional festivals. Drawing on an infrastructures of care framework, we argue that the significance of regional festivals involves determining impacts beyond the time and location of the festival because of the multiple roles they may offer for regional places and communities. Regional communities are facing challenges such as a just transition to low or zero carbon emissions; out-migration of youth and population decline; lack of essential services; and the impacts of climate change. However, despite the crucial importance arts festivals have for enhancing wellbeing, little research has considered how regional arts festivals can be leveraged to optimize their contributions to rural and regional wellbeing. We argue that festivals ‘make visible, re-vision and re-value the caring possibilities of community (Power & Mee, 2020, p. 486, emphasis added), a perspective yet to be taken up in festival studies, which we argue has been a significant barrier to understanding the full importance of arts festivals for wellbeing in regional communities.