The first annual Summer Solstice Soirée has come and gone, and it appears to have been a huge success! We’re a relatively green organization, with no formal experience in fundraising or business management under our belts. We set out on this adventure with little more than a dream of a bustling community center where creative-minded individuals could gather and do what they do best: make something.
WJHL came during our community cleanup day and did a wonderful piece about the coming event, The Greeneville Sun spoke kindly of us a number of times, and the community really turned out to share in our excitement. Thank you to everyone in attendance, everyone creating auction items, everyone bidding on auction items, and everyone in between that participated in our maiden voyage into highly-public events, and for making it a smashing success.
Special thanks goes out to all the vendors, food trucks, musicians, artists, and most of all the volunteers that created an evening of free fun all around!
We raised enough money to replace a couple of the enormous windows lining Cutler Street, furthering our ability to expand into the next adjacent building. We have concept drawings of this next expansion, but lack the capital to just make it so. In the tradition of being hard-core DIY’ers, we’re sweat-equity’ing ourselves into available space, and have a lot of room for growth!
Nothing is perfect, and hindsight is 20/20, so we’re taking notes and feedback from the event and starting planning our 2nd Annual Soirée so it will be even better than the first. Also: someone pointed out there are two solstices per year, so maybe that becomes a thing? Time will tell!
A lot of work went into planning the event, so we want to extend another special Thank You to Stephnaie DeMarchi and her band of merry planning-committee members. Nothing would have happened without you, and now that the work of planning a large event is behind us we have the breathing room to resume our regular events and working with all the new folk in scheduling more.