First Friday concert series promoter looking to expand--more concerts, smaller venues
BEREA — Plans for the First Friday concert series to expand across Berea are in the works, according to Ali Blair, founder and executive director of the community entertainment program.
Blair made presented her plans to the Tourism Commission during its regularly scheduled meeting for June. Blair, proprietor of Rebel Rebel Studio and Public House on Chestnut Street and executive director of First Fridays, produced the first concert series in 2014. The annual concerts are now a hallmark of summer in Berea.
Blair told the Commission she had come before them with an invitation to support First Fridays as they once had. She laid out the program’s three-fold mission: fortify community, diversify the arts, and to amplify what makes Berea special.
“We’re not just putting on concerts,” Blair said. “We’re nurturing a vibrant ecosystem.”
Tourism’s support dwindled
Blair recounted the history of the program, telling about how in 2013, an interest she and others had in creating a “block party” in Old Town, dovetailed with Tourism’s desire to increase foot traffic to the galleries there. An arrangement Blair made with Tourism at that time was that the concerts would increase visitors coming to the Art District, and that the series would become a sustainable event.
The overwhelming success of the first concert series impressed Tourism’s then director, Belle Jackson, according to Blair. This resulted in an ongoing partnership, with Tourism financially supporting the series annually until 2019.
Blair told The Edge in an interview that the City also had helped support First Fridays, offering help by way of the stage, event staff, and insurance for the event. The City still offers some support, she said in her presentation.
Previously, when Tourism was involved, funding for the concerts varied. In 2015, the Commission invested $20,000, but only invested $2,000 in 2016. The reduced funding that year was due to the City purchasing a number of buildings with Tourism funds, Blair told the Commission. In 2019, Tourism invested $7,800 plus $1,500 of in-kind advertising funds, and has stood down ever since.
Large outside investment in Berea
As Tourism’s support for the concert series dwindled, its popularity in the community continued to grow.
“We knew we had to look for outside funding to sustain this series,” Blair said.
The Levitt Foundation has sponsored the concert series since 2017. Since then, Blair said the Foundation has invested $220,000 in Berea, leading to over one million dollars worth of cultural activities on offer to residents and tourists alike. She also said that the concert series is attended by more than 5,000 persons each season. Each of those attendees spend an average of $29 each, buying gas, food, or other amenities, she said.
In 2017, the Foundation gave First Fridays in Berea a $25,000 matching grant, to produce 10 concerts over three months, with a focus on local, regional, and state musical acts across a variety of genres.
To help the program meet its $25,000 obligation in the first year of the Levitt Foundation’s support for the concerts, Tourism included a line item of $3,000 in Tourism’s budget, Blair said. Then in 2018, Tourism became the presenting sponsor of the full 10 concert series, spending $10,000 to help produce the series, and $1,500 to help promote it.
‘Reckoning’ leads to more funds
After the Black Lives Matter protests across the nation, sparked in June of 2020, by the killing of George Floyd by Derek Chauvin, a Minneapolis police officer, there was a “reckoning”, according to Blair. This led the Levitt Foundation to rethink how it distributes funds to the communities it serves.
Subsequently, the Foundation decided to spend down its $150 million in the next two decades, and to do so by investing more in communities, specifically to help stage concerts in-line with a belief that music brings communities together, while helping the creative economy.
To that end, the Foundation upped Berea’s First Fridays matching grant to $30,000 per year for three years, to produce 10 concerts annually. Blair told The Edge that in order to meet the match requirements annually, First Fridays applies for additional grants, sponsorships, and asks for donations.
Now, the Levitt foundation is offering $40,000 per year in matching funds to produce 30 concerts (10 per year) over the next three years, as long as First Fridays continues to meet the Foundation’s guidelines and deadlines, Blair told the Commission.
Expanded series
With the additional funds, Blair said she envisions not only attracting bigger name artists that will entice tourism from out-of-state, but also staging concerts and art experiences in more under-utilized spaces across town, at least four each concert season. Some locations already identified include Community School which is virtually unused in the summer, Glades Community Garden, Fee Park, and the Chestnut Street Pavilion.
Berea Home Village has also approached Blair, she said, asking for help in promoting community events to help end social isolation for homebound seniors.
Blair said this new format made possible by the additional Levitt monies is her “dream come true”.
“I imagined First Friday as a night when galleries would keep their doors open late, people could gallery hop, and there’d be music all over town. This gets me back to where I wanted it to be from the beginning. We were focused on just one section of town, but I wanted to take this all over town.”
To execute her vision, Blair told The Edge that First Fridays has been meeting with the City and with venue owners and managers across the City to secure permission to have concerts at the respective properties. She must have her plan in place by July 1, which is the Levitt Foundation application deadline for the next three years’ worth of funding. Whether Tourism will sign on before the July 1 deadline is still unknown.
Blair said in her presentation she’s been wondering how to have a concert at Exit 77 off I-75 for people who live near there and don't have the same kinds of entertainment opportunities as exist downtown. She also mused aloud about a back-to-school concert on the Berea College campus, or at Short and Main streets.
Beyond music, part of Blair’s vision, she said, is “to build meaningful partnerships to address community needs beyond the arts, from food security initiatives and environmental sustainability.”
To that end, First Fridays currently partners with Berea Kids Eat/Grow Appalachia as a designated “feeding site”. Children who qualify are given a free meal which is distributed by food trucks at the concerts, allowing these kids to have the “novelty and the experience of ordering from a food truck,” Blair said. To date, over 900 meals that meet USDA food guidelines have been distributed through First Fridays to hungry kids in our community, she said.
After Blair finished her presentation, Will Gover, the new chair of the Commission, asked Blair to please submit a formal proposal for how she would like to see Tourism involved in First Fridays and beyond, and to please schedule a work session for the Commission and First Fridays to review how a partnership might look.
“I walked away hopeful,” Blair told The Edge.
All of that sounds really exciting! Fingers crossed that Tourism will see the clear value (on many levels) that this concert series brings to Berea. Kudos to Ali and team!