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Success in Incorporating a Folklife Component: The Mountain Mushroom Festival in Irvine

The Mountain Mushroom Festival in Irvine experienced huge success this April, as a result of both ideal weather conditions for the morel mushroom to thrive and some innovative changes by the festival organizers. Three Estill Arts Council members, one of which is the Chair of the Mushroom Festival committee, completed the course to become certified Community Scholars. Many of the ideas for new components for the festival came as a result of the Community Scholars curriculum. Because visitors come from out of the area expecting to see and learn about mushrooms and their native context, the scholars and the festival organizers wanted to focus on celebrating and educating about their local uniqueness. Estill County’s distinct personality includes a long tradition of hunting the morel mushroom. They also hoped to get more mushroom hunters to participate in the market.

Although they can never guarantee that the weather conditions will be proper for producing morel mushrooms in a given year, they addressed the issue of disappointed visitors by incorporating educational panels with text and photos about the hunting, preparing, and marketing of the mushrooms. This information about the culture surrounding the mushroom was collected by the three Community Scholars through interviews with experienced local mushroom hunters. The Community Scholars and festival organizers worked in concert with the Estill County Arts Council to make decisions regarding the educational panels project. The local newspaper got involved by using their expertise at creating effective layout. They consulted with Gabrielle Beasley and Bob Gates of the Folklife Program about the logistics of incorporating a folklife component. In order to reach and educate more people, they plan to display the panels in the future at other venues around the community and beyond—at schools, restaurants, the library, the Historical Society, and at the Kentucky Folklife Festival in Frankfort. Next year they will further develop the text, create more panels, and integrate a continuous video loop of the actual interviews with mushroom hunters. They also hope to have more hunters available to answer the questions of festival goers at the mushroom market, where the mushrooms are weighed, priced, bargained for, and sold by the hunters themselves.

The project required a major commitment of time and energy. In addition to the Community Scholars course, the volunteers coordinating the project spent many hours writing the text, reviewing photographs, editing the educational panels, and doing other necessary tasks. They received donations of materials, which resulted in “temporary” panels that will be upgraded to “permanent” using the Folkart Grant money they were awarded for 2005 from the Kentucky Arts Council. The incorporation of educational signage was experienced as a success and an improvement, the only negative finding of the festival survey being that some people didn’t readily see the signs on the ground. High hanging banners are being considered for the future. Mary Reed’s advice for others who would like to take on a similar project is to budget much more time than you think you’ll need in order to avoid the burnout and pressure that their all-volunteer staff experienced. The festival requires year-round planning, starting immediately for the next year as soon as the festival is over. Francine Bonny, who has been the festival chair for three years and on the festival committee for 14 years, recommends for anyone attempting a similar feat to involve as many community partners as possible in the planning, conducting, and evaluation of the festival. She suggested including a committee of government officials, city leaders, business partners, and newspaper employees and keeping all collaborators very informed throughout the process.

Other images from the festival (click for larger)