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	Steven D. Remington, CFEE has 25 years experience in the events industry, with a background in advertising, sales, media & public relations as well as music promotion and production. Steve currently serves as Chairman-elect of the International Festival & Events Association Found Hawaii Healing Garden Festival 2009 join us across the state celebrating medicinal plants and multi-cultural traditions of health in Hawaii. Kauai Festivals find information about Kauai Festivals and Events International Festivals & Events Association The Premiere Association Supporting and Enabling Festival & Event Professionals Worldwide."

There is a ‘crisis of connection’ in the modern world and it is becoming ever more important that leaders in government, business, the arts and other disciplines recognize the power of celebration to renew our sense of community.

"I'm making a banner for a procession," explained three-year-old Annie. "I need a procession so that God will come down and dance with us." Funny how children recognize the importance of celebration in their lives without the advantages of a degree in anthropology!  Rituals of celebration are evident in all cultures, and provide one of the main building blocks of community. Indeed, when we celebrate we create bonds of intimacy and trust that generates and builds community.

I produced my first festival, a bluegrass"Festival on the Mountain" in 1982. It was a dozen more years before I discovered my purpose in life was "building community." I knew that I somehow 'belonged' to the community of musicians and appreciators that embraced bluegrass music for its values, lifestyle, and artistic expression. I needed to express my care and interest. I was so excited; I needed to throw a party! At least, it seemed to me like the appropriate response.

Bluegrass communities are like any other society.  They have their own social organization, structure and context, and like festivals in any community, their various activities have the power to resolve tensions and bring people together regardless of class or economic status.  The discovery that the "hippies and the rednecks" could spend an afternoon together, sharing a common love for a traditional American idiom such as bluegrass music, was pure inspiration for me.

Getting together with our families to visit, eat, and play music was a way to affirm our common values, gain shared experiences, and mark the changes that bound us together as a community.  It linked together those that came before us (well, at least since Bill Monroe!), and those that will come after us. Just like festivals.

What is community anyway?  Carolyn R. Schaffer and Kristin Anundsen, in their book "Creating Community Anywhere,"  suggest a five-point definition of community as a dynamic whole that emerges when a group of people:

    * participate in common practices;
    * depend upon one another;
    * make decisions together;
    * identify themselves as part of something larger than the sum of their individual relationships; and
    * commit themselves for the long term to their own, one another's, and the group's well-being.

An anonymous Federal Judge attending a Community Building Workshop remarked that "Community is like pornography, to paraphrase Justice Brennan: I don't know how to define it, but I sure as hell know it when I see it."

So how do festivals contribute to the process of community building?  For participants, a festival works as a community-builder in that it is a system of relationships that creates capacity for other endeavors.  Community members get together to plan an event. They discover ways of working together, which transforms into new relationships, projects, and shared desires for the larger community.  In looking back they realize they have created a larger system with more capacity than they may have first imagined.

Social scientists call this social capital.  They are the networks, trust, and cooperation that are created for mutual benefit in a community. Prosperous communities have lots of it.  The hallmarks are strong traditions of civic engagement in activities such as sports, literary circles, the arts, civic clubs, and strong voter turnout and newspaper readership.

In the Northwest Policy Center’s checklist for sustainable communities, fostering "Commitment to Place" is the number one feature of a successful and sustainable community. How does that manifest itself? According  to their workbook, it's living-wage jobs, educational opportunities, respect for the environment, forums for discourse, and plentiful historic celebrations, festivals, fairs and community projects that build a sense of commitment to the community and its landscape.

In the process of building relationships, festivals build social tolerance, too. As Margaret J. Wheatley puts it in "A Simpler Way," "It is astonishing to see how many of the behaviors we fear in one another dissipate in the presence of good relationships. Customers engaged in finding solutions become less insistent on perfection. Colleagues linked by a work project become more tolerant of one another's lives. A community invited into a local chemical plant learns how the plant could create devastating environmental disasters, yet becomes more trusting." Healthy systems and networks also allow greater diversity, further increasing social tolerance.

For a community and its festival attendees, the festival can encourage community building in a much broader way.  Anthropologist Robert H. Lavenda, in his 1997 book "Corn Fests and Water Carnivals: Celebrating Community in Minnesota," says festivals are "the universal human practice" of making sense of our lives in the context of our community. According to Lavenda, "Festivals persist and people make efforts to maintain them because they are social practices that enable communities to continue as going concerns."

Festivals become mirrors, in a way, of the larger community from which they emerge, providing the unique flavor of each community. As the festival reflects back the values, mores, tastes, and resources of the larger community, the event  embraces the many factions, groups, ideals and shared visions.

Festivals allow us to examine who we are and what we have become as a community.  Ways of acting and being are defined through these interactions, and as we act together, as we celebrate together, our identity grows and evolves.  Thus the festival's role in the community becomes more obvious. Making it all the more important that the festival's programming  reflects the community's interests, and not just those of the governing board and staff.

While we often focus, as planners, on the inward mechanisms and relationships necessary to stage the festival, such as board relationships, committee development, outreach efforts to other organizations, media relationships, internal communications, and other 'linkages to stakeholders,' it is important to remember that we are facilitators in this process of community building. We must trust people to learn how to get along.

One of the most significant ways in which festivals build community is by their sheer regularity.  Because they recur every summer, they provide a means of reflecting on the passage of time; watching the children transition from face paints to marching band to young business people participating in the festival's organizing body. Senior citizens retire and take volunteer positions on festival committees, or participate in events that honor the older members of the community. It becomes a community's way of measuring time.

Students who have gone away to school, or those who have moved as a result of our increasingly mobile society, find solace and comfort in seeing old friends and familiar surroundings when they return to their hometown festivals. In fact, at many festivals, it might still appear to be 1982, with little change in the activities and general structure of the event! Catching up on the latest news and gossip, planning family reunions and visits from relatives all add to the excitement of the annual event.

Despite festival planners attempts to "freshen up" the event, critics will complain that "it's just not the same as it used to be," or conversely, "it's the same old thing." Yet it is this predictability and continuity that builds the community's cultural memory.  It's comforting to return to your hometown and, even though buildings have changed and people have grown up, the festival still has a sense of timelessness and tradition. We feel connected when we participate in our community festivals.

Benjamin Zander suggests that "because the straight-edged organization of our cities and towns -- as well as many aspects of our daily lives -- tends to mirror our perceptual maps, urban life may magnify the boundaries that keep us in a state of separateness." Community celebrations counteract this separateness, helping us to connect with other community members outside of our normal routines. And despite the downsizing, the increased layoffs and outsourcing in business, community is no less required in the modern age than it was in the early days of human (societal) development.  In the workplace we are pulled in opposite directions by empowerment and outsourcing, trends that amplify the difficulty of building community in modern life. Scott Peck teaches us that "if top leaders want community, they can make it happen" in their organizations and that while we may not be in "genuine community" at all times, truly healthy communities will recognize it immediately when they are not, and are willing to spend the effort to regain it if it is lost. In "A World Waiting to be Born," Peck acknowledges that community isn't built once; it must be nurtured through an ongoing process of "maintenance and renewal," not unlike the upkeep and repair required of a physical structure.  Jay Conger, in his book "The Brave New World of Leadership Training," says "Building community is the most important task of leaders today," combining "the two basic leadership competencies -- visioning and empowerment."

People long for meaning. They look for it in their rituals, seek it in their culture, from their parents, teachers, friends and community leaders. They create for themselves values which then govern their interactions with people and help shape the communities in which they live. They explore the community, seeking integration into the community. To belong.  Festivals are a way of being, in which individuals can safely be themselves, while simultaneously being with many different types of cultures, personalities, and stages of developments.  In this and many other ways, festivals build community, diversity, tolerance, and positive values like sharing, helping, contributing and being a part of the community.

This article, by Steve Remington, CFEE, first appeared in “International Events Magazine” published by International Festivals & Events Association. It also appeared in Oregon Parks & Recreation Association Magazine, Volume 2, Issue 1.