Lowell Folk Festival takes a bow

LOWELL — The stage lights of the 37th annual Lowell Folk Festival were turned off after the last acts finished their sets Sunday evening, but the glow of the three-day music, food and arts celebration lingered.

It was a high that Director Lee Viliesis was still savoring.

“I think the festival went really well this year,” she said by text on Wednesday. “The weather was perfect and both audiences and artists were having a great time. That’s all I could ever ask for in an event.”

The free festival is the longest-running in the United States and the 2024 lineup featured 20 performers on four stages, more than a dozen food vendors, numerous exhibits, dance tents and a variety of distinctive cultural experiences.

It also featured more than 200 bucket brigade volunteers, including Milo McFadden, who canvassed the almost 20-block footprint of the festival collecting donations for the extravaganza.

Milo is the 6-year-old son of Danielle McFadden, the president and CEO of the Greater Lowell Chamber of Commerce. The organization provides online and general fundraising support, marketing and public relations for the festival.

But the Chamber’s primary role during the festival is to coordinate the bucket brigade, in which teams of volunteers fan out across the festival’s venues and grounds to solicit donations in exchange for a string of colored beads and the feeling that comes with helping to support a storied cultural tradition.

McFadden said volunteering for the bucket brigade was her family’s favorite part, which she called a “summertime tradition.” Besides in-kind donations, sponsors and merchandise sales, the festival relies on the generosity of its visitors to help keep the $1.5 million public gathering free and financially healthy.

“We don’t have a specific number of what was raised, but I can say firsthand how generous and enthusiastic festival-goers were – many donating multiple times throughout the weekend!” she said by email on Wednesday.

Local business also enjoyed a festival bounce. Lala Books opened its doors on Market Street in July 2021, a year the festival was canceled due to the COVID pandemic, but owner Laura Lamarre Anderson said the excitement builds even before the festival opens with visitors exploring Downtown Lowell in what she called “full festival mode.”

“We had well over 500 people in the store over the weekend,” she said. “We talked to folks about local authors, popular books, and summer reading requirements, but mostly about how much fun they were having. It was great to see that there were so many people from outside the city who were learning about what downtown has to offer.”

Anderson said Market Street was packed with people on Saturday and Sunday — she even gave a Market Street stage shoutout for Milo’s bucket brigade collection efforts.

“Folk Festival is our favorite weekend of the year,” Anderson said. “Our staff worked long hours and we were all exhausted by Sunday night, but it was totally worth it.”

One of the biggest draws of the festival each year is the food from various local organizations presenting an international flavor. Walking through the JFK Plaza, Boarding House Park and Market Street sections of the festival can make it difficult to decide what to eat when the sights and smells of a hugely diverse menu of food all compete for attention.

Among the most popular food vendors of the festival was Iskwelahang Pilipino, which has had a tent in the Boarding House Park section to serve Filipino food every year since it started in 1987. In the immediate aftermath of the festival, IP’s Elsa Janairo said it is too early to say how much money was raised to support the Filipino cultural school while they do a count. But as far as the amount of food that was served, Janairo said they very well may have set a record, selling well over 1,000 pounds of meat in three days.

“We realized Saturday night that we were on the brink of running out of meat to grill, which has never happened to us before,” said Janairo.

IP ended up needing to purchase more meat for the final day of the festival Sunday. Through the entire weekend, Janairo said the group sold approximately 640 pounds of grilled pork and 865 pounds of grilled chicken by the weight of the raw meat.

Janairo said she received feedback from the teenaged volunteers that did most of the interacting with customers. She said the volunteers told her the customers this year seemed happier than they had sometimes appeared in past years, calling it a kind of “pervasive joy.”

Janairo also loved the palpable camaraderie between food vendors, from lending cooking equipment to purchasing food from other tents to bring back to their own to eat.

“It was great to support each other and be a part of this giant community-building effort, and to be able to establish connections with new customers on top of the ones that come back every year,” said Janairo.

Like IP, most of the festival food vendors use the occasion as the opportunity to fundraise for their various causes. In JFK Plaza was Acha’s Foundation, which Delphine Acha founded to benefit children and prisoners in her native Cameroon, where the food they cooked originates from.

Friday and Saturday were as busy as any Lowell Folk Festival weekend, Acha said, but she noted Sunday appeared to be one of the slowest days of the festival she can remember.

While she is still doing a full accounting, Acha said customers spent an estimated $13,000 on food from her tent over the course of the three days, approximately $8,000 of which will go to the foundation after festival expenses are accounted for. That money will be used to fund scholarships for students in Cameroon, as well as for outreach to a Cameroonian prison.

“That started from a request where prisoners didn’t have money for bail … about $20 in American dollars,” said Acha. “Our aim is to go to the prison and speak with the prison warden to see exactly what the prisoners need, and how we can assist them.”

Some of this assistance will involve doing exactly what Acha did over the weekend: cooking a lot of food. Acha said her foundation is working with a Cameroonian prison to try to provide food to a portion of its 4,000 inmates, though the logistics are still being worked out, as they will not have enough food to cook for all of them.

Acha, like many of the vendors, use the festival as their primary, and sometimes only fundraising source each year. While the festival only ended a few days ago, some could be eyeing the countdown clock that has already been reset on the festival website. Only 357 days to go.