ANNOUNCEMENT

After 22 years of delivering successful, free, all day music festivals, the Boolarra Folk Festival Committee is considering options to scale-down and promote smaller and more frequent events at local venues in the future.

The committee remains committed to supporting local music and cultural events and will continue to work toward bringing people together and showcasing our town.

The considerable time and effort required to deliver an annual all-day festival, however, has become too much with our current resources.

Significant funding must be sought each year to provide a free festival with costs that continue to rise. Delivering the all-day folk festival requires 60 volunteers to setup, manage and bump out the festival. There has also been an increasing administrative burden placed upon the committee, who are all volunteers.

Key members of the committee are stepping down following, in some cases, decades of service to this community.

The festival has played a significant role in building our musical reputation as part of the arts corridor in the Latrobe Valley and South Gippsland areas.

During these years, more than 800, mostly local, musicians have played on the main stage, the Memorial Hall and ARC Yinnar, and over 170,000 people have attended the festival, generating around $1.2 million each year within the community.

By scaling down and focusing on more frequent local events, however, the cost, organisation and labour will be less demanding upon volunteers and the community will still benefit from musical performances.

The committee would like to take this opportunity to thank the many people who have supported the festival for over two decades.

Our volunteers, musicians, performers and market stall holders created a festival that became an iconic event in the Latrobe Valley.

Our sponsors and funding bodies, especially the Latrobe City Council, made it possible to keep the festival free and accessible.

And the committee is grateful to the thousands of audience members who enjoyed and appreciated the multi award-winning Boolarra Folk Festival within the beautiful setting of Gippsland’s Strzelecki Ranges.

While we appreciate and accept that this necessary decision will be disappointing to many, the committee looks forward to working with the community to support, promote, and celebrate local music and culture through a new approach.