Ten Years of Caribbean Festivals, and What They Were All For

It is easy for a nonprofit to say it runs community events. It is harder to show fifty-six of them with dates, venues and ticket links attached, which is why we have put the whole back catalogue on our events page rather than describing it in the abstract.

The record runs from 2016 to this year and it is public on Eventbrite. Twenty-five of those events were at Howard County Fairgrounds. Eleven were at Veterans Plaza in Silver Spring. The rest are spread across Rosecroft Raceway, Prince William County Fairgrounds, Bowie Baysox Stadium, Mary's Land Farm in Ellicott City, Arlington Beer Garden, Eleanor Roosevelt High School and Balkonie in Greenbelt.

A handful of properties do most of the work. The Caribbean Food and Wine Festival and Taste of Jamaica have each run ten times. Jamaica Day Reggae Festival six, the International Reggae Wine Festival four, and the Silver Spring Jerk and Barbecue Festival four. Around those sit one-off and occasional events: the Marcus Garvey Foundation fish fry, an Educators Support Group fish fry at Eleanor Roosevelt High School, a Reggae Salute to Our National Heroes, Jamaica Independence celebrations.

Some of them had genuine moments. Richie Stephens played the Reggae Love Festival. WPGC 95.5 FM hosted a Caribbean Wine and Food Festival. A few years the gate prize was a trip to Jamaica for two.

Not everything worked. Events get cancelled, sometimes for weather, and those are not in the list because they did not happen and we are not going to pad a track record. What is in the list is what we ran.

The point of all of it is the same. Ticket revenue from these festivals funds books, school supplies, scholarships and mentoring for at-risk young people, and it goes toward the permanent leadership training center we are raising money to build in Jamaica.

That is a slightly odd sentence to write about a jerk festival, and it is worth sitting with. A Caribbean community in Maryland turns out for food and music, and the proceeds pay exam fees for a child in Jamaica who would otherwise have left school. The events are genuinely a good day out. They are also, straightforwardly, the funding model.

The next one is on the events page. So is every one we have already done.