January 13, 2025
NATIONAL FOLK FESTIVAL

NEA gives $80,000 for folk festival Officials expect events to attract thousands

BANGOR – National Folk Festival organizers said Friday that with the receipt of an $80,000 federal grant, fund raising for the first year of the much-anticipated event has reached the halfway mark.

“We’re getting there,” said Donna Fichtner, executive director of the Bangor Convention and Visitors Bureau, one of the major funding partners for the festival.

Fichtner said news of the National Endowment for the Arts grant came on the heels of a new budget analysis, which suggested the costs could approach $2 million over three years, up from the $1.5 million in initial estimates.

“This is a real encouragement,” Fichtner said of the grant, which puts the fund-raising efforts at more than $400,000 for the first year’s event, which organizers said will cost between $800,000 and $850,000. “It’s a real shot in the arm for the first year.”

With the NEA grant, total pledges approached $950,000 for the three-year festival, Fichtner said.

The festival will take place Aug. 23, 24 and 25 along the Penobscot River waterfront in Bangor. An estimated 60,000 to 75,000 people are expected to attend the festival, which will include five performance stages, demonstrations of traditional crafts and skills, a craft vending area and a children’s area.

Admission is free.

“I am hopeful that this will be the first of several federal contributions to this outstanding event, which will be a tremendous boon to the city of Bangor,” said U.S. Sen. Susan Collins in announcing the grant to the Eastern Maine Development Corp.

National organizers chose Bangor from among several cities to be host of the festival for three days in August 2002, 2003 and 2004.

The National Council for the Traditional Arts, based in Washington, D.C., began the festival in the 1930s. In recent years, the festival, billed as the oldest multicultural event in the nation, has taken up three-year residences in cities throughout the United States.


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