Today we want to take a moment to thank the sponsors and supporters of our festival, without whom we would not have been able to create such a festival.
These are the companies, groups and organizations that give us money, supplies, food and other types of help in order to allow us to stretch our limited budget and resources to their maximum to create a two day event like Heart of the City.
We rely on grant money from local organizations that provide support for arts and community development, so we would like to thank the Edmonton Arts Council http://www.edmontonarts.ca/ , E4C http://e4calberta.org/ and the McCauley Revitalization Fund http://www.edmonton.ca/city_government/projects_redevelopment/mccauley-revitalization.aspx for their financial support this year. These organizations support this community and understand that without a well-funded arts and cultural scene in a neighbourhood it will not feel alive and vibrant, and therefore it will not attract community-minded citizens to the area.
Local community organizations sometimes come forward with surprise support, often when our associates and board members give them a bit of a friendly nudge. This year the Inn Roads Housing Cooperative http://www.innroads.ca/ chose to give us just such support, as a sign, we beleive, that having arts and music events in the community is essential to a well-rounded neighbourhood. Unfortunately, we did not have time to get them into the guide book this year, but we will be sure to include them next year to make up for it!
Local community leagues offered us incredible support, such as the McCauley Community League http://mccauley.info, Parkdale Cromdale Community League http://www.parkdalecromdale.org/, Riverdale Community League http://www.riverdalians.net/, and Alberta Avenue Community League http://www.albertaave.org/. These community leagues offered festival supplies, monetary support, folding tents, meeting spaces, and fundraiser party spaces, which really helped us create the infrastructure that supports the artists and musicians on the festival grounds and helped us to organize and fundraise for the festival.
This year we received a helping hand from the Nina Haggerty Centre for the Arts http://www.thenina.ca/, who provided us with loads of folding tables and chairs for our art vendors, partners, workshops and info booths.
HOTC received promotional support from many local media outlets in the lead-up to the 2014 festival. For example, CKUA http://www.ckua.com/ , CJSR http://cjsr.com/ and Boyle McCauley News http://bmcnews.org/ all offered us space and airtime to promote our festival. Thanks to these great local-centric media outlets and to any others who mentioned our festival to your readers, watchers or listeners this year! We could not have gotten the word out and had such a successful weekend without you!
Every year since 2009 the Edmonton Folk Music Festival http://www.edmontonfolkfest.org/ has been one of our largest and most important supporters! They offer us the tents that you see around the park, housing the artists, workshops, and most notably the huge clam-shell tents and stages from which the music comes! This has been an immense boon to our little festival, and has allowed us to take the festival from a little-known party in the back alleys of McCauley to a highly anticipated, two-day multi-disciplinary arts and music festival in Giovanni Caboto Park, in just a few short years.
Over the few years we have worked with the fine folks at Gateway Screen and Press http://gatewaypress.ca/ to help us print Posters, Stickers, Booklets, T-Shirts and more! We wish to thank Jonny and the friendly and knowledgeable staff for their help as we sometimes send files to them that are less than print-ready, and they always make it work for us with a smile!
We have been working with other local events to cross-promote the Heart of the City. These include The Thousand Faces Festival of Mythic Art http://thousandfaces.ca/, and the Common Ground Arts Society http://www.commongroundarts.ca/. This summer we have many more festivals that we plan to show up at, so keep your eyes open for the HOTC info tents and say hello to our friendly volunteers and board members.
Each year the folks at Listen Louder Productions http://listenlouder.ca/ come out and produce a fantastic sounding festival for us! This year was no different. Whether Mike and Radar were mixing a single singer-songwriter playing a guitar, or a full band blaring modern rock music, they made it sound fantastic! Thanks again you guys.
Since we moved to the Giovanni Caboto Park in 2009 we have been supported by the folks at the Boys and Girls Club http://bgcbigs.ca/ and this year they came through for us once again, providing a staging point, and most importantly they provided the electricity that runs the stages and art vendors tents!
This year we had our first ever Youth Songwriting Contest, which was a huge success! The sponsors for this event were Bent Arrow http://bentarrow.ca/, CJSR http://cjsr.com/, Parkdale Cromdale Community League http://www.parkdalecromdale.org/ and iHuman http://ihumanyouthsociety.org/ . They helped us by providing space for the events, offering the prizes, and funding the purchase of 3 iPads for the finalists! Next year we hope to expand on this contest and create an amazing opportunity for Youth in the inner-city and throughout Edmonton to compete for some great prizes.
At our very first fundraiser of the year we had some audience members who introduced themselves to us as representatives from Mammoet http://www.mammoet.com/, who were searching for community initiatives to sponsor. Our meetings went very well, and we found the representatives of Mammoet were friendly and supportive. This has been our first time working with an international company as a sponsor, and it has been really great to see interest from such a large organization in our little festival.
Those of you who were at the festival may have noticed some new tents beside the stages? Those are our very first Chamber of Commerce tents! We went to a few local CC groups this year, but the ones who came through and helped us expand the festival were the Latino Canadian Chamer of Comerce http://www.latinocanadianchamberofcommerce.com/ . With their support we gave our festival goers some new vendors, new foods to try and introduced them to the local Latino community! Next year we hope to expand even further and offer our audience even more of the world that our multi-cultural community provides!
Our audition process this year was bit of a departure from previous years, as we chose to go out into the community to showcase the talent that was vying to be on the stage at HOTC. In keeping with our mission to bring music and arts to the inner-city neighbourhoods, we were offered a space at the Bissel Centre http://bissellcentre.org/ , and the Boyle Street Drop-in http://boylestreet.org/. The people who were in those audiences for the auditions were so incredibly supportive and happy to have us, that we will definitely be back next year, if not sooner!