Fall Festival Recap
Fall Festival Recap
“Doesn’t this place feel great!” ellicottvilleny.com
It’s a great year to celebrate autumn, the winter season coming up, and life getting back to normal. This year's annual Fall Festival was faced with a lot of new challenges, but overall, it was a huge success. With staffing shortages across the board and our Canadian friends still not able to cross the border, the Ellicottville Chamber of Commerce and the local community pulled off another large-scale event that was nothing short of outstanding.
We reduced the number of vendors significantly over the past five years and hosted 20% less vendors than in 2019. Even though the footprint of the show remained the same, the additional space allowed our patrons more room to not only walk, social distance, and enjoy Ellicottville, but also created more visibility to our local businesses.
With the elimination of our kid’s carnival, we had room to get creative and bring a new concept into the event. This year we invited the PUNT foundation to host a Kid's Fun Zone. They had a 9-hole mini golf game, kids’ crafts, planko, spin the wheel and more fun interactive activities to offer families who attended.
We chatted with Madison Szpaicher, assistant director of The P.U.N.T. Foundation and Ellicottville native, who said they had a lot of fun even during the rainfall Saturday early afternoon. "The opportunity to bring awareness to the southern tier was something we simply couldn't pass up."
The P.U.N.T. Pediatric Cancer Collaborative is a non-for-profit that provides families in WNY facing pediatric cancer with critical programs that offer assistance in all aspects - from financial assistance to emotional support, and even bereavement. This organization was founded by former NFL Pro Bowl Punter, Brian Moorman. Brian and his wife, Amber both had a hunger to make a difference for kids in WNY who were fighting cancer in addition to giving back to the community.
A few other new attractions to this year’s event included a COVID-19 vaccination clinic organized by the Cattaraugus County Health Department, and Turf for Tots came with crafts made from the Buffalo Bills’ old turf. Corey Lee, founder of Turf for Tots has been raising money to support cancer research and programs to help children fighting cancer and blood disorders at Roswell Park.
From an organizer’s standpoint, there's a fine line that we have to be cautious of when it comes to planning such a large event. Of course, we want to keep the tradition of the event, but more importantly we want to make sure it's enjoyable for everyone, including our local businesses and homeowners. Pulling off an event of this magnitude takes a lot of manpower and time. If we take a step behind the scenes and look at what organizing Fall Festival is like, you would find our office, a total of 2 full-time staff and one part-time, processing hundreds of applications, making up maps, preparing mailings, permit applications, making and hanging no parking signs, measuring and numbering the streets for vendor booths, creating content for social media, organizing flaggers, ordering detour signs, committee meetings ... the list continues to even the little things such as ordering garbage can liners. A lot of what we do is not glamorous, but the return on our efforts, including the small mundane things, makes it all worthwhile, especially when we see our village thriving.
We can't thank our support team enough for helping us bring back Ellicottville's Fall Festival. Various groups of people, businesses and organizations helped us make the 2021 Fall Festival one for the books. There were hundreds of hours put into planning and organizing this event and the hard work certainly doesn't go unnoticed.
Keeping the community clean is one of the things we pride ourselves with and has been for many, many years, a critical part of the event not only to us, but to our community and those who come to enjoy our village. Ellicottville is known for a lot of great attributes - one of the biggest being how beautiful and clean our village is. Although our office staff, Brian and myself look after the cleanup in the business district (as some may recall seeing us out there as early as 4:00am taking care of the streets), there simply isn’t enough time for us to look after the residential area of the village, too. After making a call to my husband, Travis Wallace, and Samuel Schwartz, local ECS student, we were able to organize a small group of local ECS students and residents to help us with keeping our village clean. Travis Wallace, Samuel Schwartz, Maddox Bush, Ignacio DeOrbe, and Adrian DeOrbe all dedicated several hours and were a tremendous help to us this past Fall Festival … thank you!
Overall, it was a great weekend! Hats off to everyone as this is a Fall Festival to be remembered.