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With a diverse lineup of ticketed shows onstage at the Bankhead Theater each year, the venue’s outdoor plaza has also become a hub for family-friendly community celebrations of culture in the Tri-Valley.
Livermore Valley Arts CEO Chris Carter says the cultural events that have been established as annual traditions will continue into the foreseeable future even though some recent funding impacts have slightly shifted the path forward.
According to Carter, the outdoor community events that include the Indigenous People’s Celebration, Taste of Africa, Filipino Barrio Fiesta, Pridefest, Diwali, Lunar New Year, AANHPI (Asian American, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander) Celebration, Hispanic Heritage Celebration and Juneteenth will now be fully managed by the partner organizations that have worked with LVA over the years to bring the events to life. This includes the Livermore Filipino-American Organization, Livermore Pride, Tri-Valley for Black Lives and Cheza Nami, among others.
LVA will continue to support each event financially as it has in the past but the logistics, including booking performers and vendors, securing any necessary rental equipment and other tasks, will be handled by the nonprofits and community groups at the center of each respective event.
“Cheza Nami’s a good example. They do the Taste of Africa event and they really are the managers of that event – we don’t manage it,” Carter told Livermore Vine in an interview. “We sponsor it, we partner with them on it with the management of the Livermore Filipino Barrio Fiesta and it’s all in the same weekend and share resources and things like that, so that event was going to continue whether we were involved or not and then the Barrio Fiesta was going to continue whether we were involved or not.”
“But one thing that we hadn’t really discussed too much as we talked about transitioning was considering that these events continue on, we’ve been funding them pretty heavily and they still need funding so I don’t want to abandon that,” he added. Â
Additionally, Carter told Livermore Vine that there had been discussions between him and Arthur Barinque – a community and event organizer contracted by the Bankhead to help produce and facilitate these events – about doing a larger cultural festival in addition to the individual events; however, moving forward with that idea is not currently feasible financially and LVA determined that keeping the individual celebrations alive was of higher priority right now.
Carter said that while the cultural celebrations are valued and meaningful to the community, they are typically free to the public and don’t generate any revenue for LVA or the Bankhead Theater and therefore, in the face of financial strain, a shift was necessary.
“I like the idea of these events continuing. I think it’s important. I’ve gotten a lot of feedback from different people around the community that they’re important events,” Carter said.
“We kind of came to a little crossroads with our budget trying to figure out what we could potentially do and not do,” Carter acknowledged. “This last year’s been – for a lot of nonprofit organizations – kind of a weird year. We didn’t hit our goal for fundraising this last year; we missed it by quite a bit so we’re trying to figure out the best way to go forward.”
He noted, however, that they are planning to announce a big fundraising campaign this month. “We have a strategy to get our fundraising back up, but it was definitely a hard year,” Carter said.Â
LVA missed its fundraising goal last year by $600,000, according to Carter. “It wasn’t that we did anything different – we’re actually pretty good at fundraising – but people’s philanthropic priorities changed this year and oftentimes when that happens, the arts gets dropped to the bottom of the list.”
The funding for the cultural event series is through LVA’s education and outreach fund along with additional sponsors that help cover the cost, like Las Positas College.
“It’s substantive when you add everything up over the whole year – it’s somewhere between $70,000 and $100,000 every year that we’re putting towards these events,” Carter said. Â
In the future, Carter said he’d love to see some sort of a grant from the city to support the cultural series, noting that council members are often in attendance at the events. “I know they have a lot on their plate too, but I’ve been saying for years this is not something we can continually do at this pace without more support,” he said.       Â
While finances may have forced LVA to make the transition sooner, Carter noted that it had been a goal for the various organizing groups to take over managing their respective events, similar to the Quest Science Center’s Tri-Valley Innovation Fair that originated at the Bankhead.
“We actually started that here and Quest was one of our partners and then over the years it became more obvious that it was actually in better hands with Quest leading and organizing the program and so we turned it over to them and we became a fiscal sponsor for it. So we still contributed to the event as a sponsor, but we let them take over the management of the event and they’ve actually moved it from downtown Livermore to the fairgrounds because it got so big,” Carter said.  Â
Looking ahead, the door for a new weekend cultural festival produced by LVA is not completely closed, Carter said. “If we have a good year, if things get better, I told Arthur we could talk again after the new year about putting this weekend celebration back on the table maybe for the summer or for next fall. I’d love to do that if we could get that figured out for sure,” he said.
In the meantime, some of the upcoming events remaining in this year’s cultural event series include Taste of Africa on Oct. 4, Barrio Fiesta set for Oct. 5 and Pridefest on Oct. 18.
