Children’s Fest plans underway

Times Reporter 

 

Plans are well underway for this year’s Strathmore Children’s Festival at the Civic Centre, April 12. Every year the festival, as of this year, will support one charity if there is any money raised – the event is free to attend- and any sponsorship dollars raised beyond what’s needed for the festival will be reinvested into the next year. 

At the door there will be a donation acceptance set up and a raffle of donated items for people to enter. There will also be goodie bags given to the first 100 families.

“All of the money raised off of that goes to one charity each year. This year it’s School Fuel,” said Ryan Parkins, who is helping organize this year’s event.

“(We picked them) largely because it is a local organization that is under-recognized so we thought we could offer it kind of two fold benefits. Number one we can raise funds for it, and we can also raise program awareness.”

The Parkins’ have recruited a number of volunteers already but will likely need another five to 10 people to put their name forward. Throughout the day the volunteer’s job is to man one of the events, maybe monitor a bouncy house, or an arts table and help kids put crafts together. The time frame depends on if they are needed for a shift or if they are able to spend the whole day helping. 

If the volunteer is not overly mobile, maybe they will take care of the door, it depends on who offers to volunteer, said Parkins, but he will try and fit them in where best suits them.

None of the events of the day can be officially released at this point but there does promise to be physical and safety aspects to it. 

“There will definitely be your physical activities, like your bouncy houses. There’s definitely going to be some arts and crafts, as well there are going to be 10-minute stage shows this year,” said Parkins.

“The focal point this year is going to hopefully be safety, we’re going to talk to a number of local and protective and emergency services and hopefully we’ll get them involved in doing a presentation that is kind of fun but also focuses on the different elements of safety for each of them.

“One of the big things that is different about our expo versus some … is everything in ours has to be child related, they can’t just be a vendor and have a general purpose product. The expectation is that the products and services must be child related because that is the focus of this show.”

For more information go to www.strathmoreexpos.com. There is a section for each kind of user, whether it’s attractions for the general attendee, a potential sponsors page, a volunteer’s page and a vendor’s page. The site is kept up-to-date as new events and vendors are listed.