Tunes Tuesday: Swell Folk Festival

How many years coming is this festival or how long have you been working on this?

We’ve been working on it about a year and a half in total. I’m a long-time folk music lover and festival goer and I’ve gone to Newport Folk Festival for around 14 years. It’s a great event, nothing against Newport at all, but there’s so much talented local music in Rhode Island. We thought there was an opportunity to create something to bring attention to more of the local talent in the area while also having something in our neighborhood in Providence. There’s a group of folks who are creatively inspired by all of the local talent and we all came together to work on putting on this event. There’s about four of us on the team.

You guys are a 501c nonprofit. What is your mission statement?

The mission statement for the nonprofit is to build community through the arts. The idea is really just focused on bringing the local community together and we’re starting with this music festival. We wanted to write the mission statement in a way where it could be broader than that so down the road if we wanted to expand the type of work and groups we’re working with and communities we’re focusing on, we could.

What would it look like to expand in the future?

We’re pretty much all hands-on deck trying to pull this festival off but we’ve talked about things like working with local schools and that sort of thing to help invest in music programs and programming. Partnering with local venues in the city to try to put on instead of one big festival, like periodic events in support of different causes. There’s such a great art and mural presence in this city so another thing we’ve talked a little bit about is trying to come together and put up some music related artwork around the city.

You said it’s been a year and a half coming, what avenues have you guys taken for fundraising?

We’ve started at the Hope Street Market. Most of us actually live on the East Side pretty close to Lippitt Park, where the events going on. So, the team at the Hope Street Farmers Market kind of offered us the space and we started to save up and collect donations. We’ve also partnered with a few different people, like Moniker Brewery which is the official partner for the beer garden. Over the winter we also ran an open mic series with them, which was great because it helped give us visibility to local artists that might want to play the festival. We’ve also had fundraising events at Myrtle in East Providence.

What do you think makes the festival stand out from others around the area?

The biggest thing that jumps out to me is that it’s walkable. It was challenging getting access to Lippitt Park from the city for this event because it’s going to be a bigger event which are usually at India Point Park. The parks department worked with us and we’re so excited to have a music festival nestled in the community. It’s also a free event. We’re not selling any tickets. It’s basically open for anyone to attend and come in and just hang out for the day and it’s purely local artists performing, which is kind of unique.

What should people expect from the day?

It’s going to run from 10am to 8pm. There are going to be two stages, and PVD Lemonade Stand will be operating one of them. We’re going to have a little folk’s tent which is going to have face painting, glitter tattoos and henna and an instrument petting zoo. There’s going to be about six food trucks, a beer garden and then we’re also going to have a whole crafting tent for people where we’ve got a couple local artists leading crafts.

To find more information and to donate, visit the festivals website here.