Get Involved in the Festival 

• Festival registration is available online.  Early bird registration has been extended to May 31! Please take a look at our website at this link and start planning now!    
• The festival schedule is up (check back in for updates regularly)!  
• Late Night Raucous Caucus: ROOTS Fest Late Night Raucous Caucus welcomes artists who want to share their talents in short performances (7 minutes max!) that fit with each of the Late Nights' themes. Please go here and sign up if you'd like to perform.  If you've ever been to the Annual Meeting, you know that, when ROOTS does late night, it's "legen - wait for it! - dary!" 
• Call for Participation: Community Chorus - Do you like to sing?  Are you part of a choir, performing group, or even just a tuneful individual?  ROOTS Fest will culminate with a community choir concert on Sunday, June 22 on the outdoor festival site.  Please contact Elise Witt if you are interested.  
• Do you live in Kentucky, West Virginia, Virginia, or Tennessee? If so, the Appalachian Community Fund may have money to help with your travel to ROOTS Fest.  Please go here to find the application guidelines.  

In preparation for ROOTS Fest, Baltimore residents held a Clean-Up Day on Saturday, May 14 from 10:00-2:00 at the "Hidden Stream" spot in West Baltimore.  

A part of a ROOTS-funded C/APP project that will culminate at the Festival, CultureWorks, Fayette Outreach Community Center, Parks & People Foundation, and Nicodemus Baptist Church led the charge for the clean-up day. 

"This clean up is a true sign of how art and culture, within a community engagement, can create change," says Ashley Milburn, Co-Director of the local non-profit CultureWorks. "This is a community event and we're working together on a new creative a future with the residents of this Baltimore community."

Read the full story here.

REGISTER NOW FOR 

Art, Culture, and Creativity

A National Learning Exchange 

June 22-24, 2011

Baltimore, MD  

Join Alternate ROOTS on the occasion of our 35th birthday for a three-day galvanizing event that will elevate the national conversation about the power of art, culture, and creativity in building and maintaining resilient communities.

Art, Culture & Creativity: A National Learning Exchange, is an event grounded in the values needed to develop healthy communities: open dialogue, participation, shared power, creativity, consideration, compassion, and holistic living. We will begin by grounding ourselves in the rich history of West Baltimore, the neighborhood bordering the noted "Highway to Nowhere," and we'll learn about the community's past, present, and future challenges as well as opportunities. Together, we will take a community-oriented approach to tackling these opportunities and create a shared road map for building and maintaining resilient communities for Baltimore and the country.

Across the nation, from The Bronx to Baltimore to Detroit to Oakland and everywhere in between, communities face the same complex problems of derelict infrastructure, violence, illness, oppression, and invisibility. Media focus on negatives, stories that sell but don't highlight the hardworking, responsible people who are the glue that keeps a community together. This relentless onslaught renders a whole community invisible. These issues are knitted together in a tight weave that sometimes seems impossible to break. But they are not. Working together, we can overcome even seemingly insurmountable challenges and manifest true community development with art, culture, and creativity.

 ROOTS Fest's National Honorary Committee 

"Powerhouses within the arts world; that's what this Honorary Committee is," said Keryl McCord of Alternate ROOTS. "As a group, they make a powerful statement about what ROOTS Fest is about - artists working in community and a commitment to making work by and for, about and with their communities. Art empowers, heals, and unites communities."

Click here to view the full list.  Here are just a few:

Mark Valdez   

Network of Ensemble Theaters

Mark Valdez is the National Coordinator for the Network of Ensemble Theaters (NET), a national coalition of ensemble-based organizations headquartered in Los Angeles, advancing ensemble sustainability and practice. Prior to working with NET, he served as the Associate Artistic Director for Cornerstone Theater Company, a community-based ensemble working in LA  

and around the country.

About ROOTS Fest, Mr. Valdez says: "ROOTS Fest is a national festival for, by, with and about community.  Although the focus is specifically on West Baltimore, the dialogue, the artmaking, and the very structure of the event itself, will serve as a model of organizing and collaboration for organizations around the country.  This is leadership in action."

Claudine K. Brown  Smithsonian Institution

Claudine K. Brown is the assistant secretary for education and access for the Smithsonian Institution. She is responsible for defining the Smithsonian's education program.  Brown had been the director of the arts and culture program at the Nathan Cummings Foundation in New York since 1995. In 1990, she joined the Smithsonian to serve as director of the National African-American Museum Project.

Sandra Gibson   

Association of Performing Arts Presenters (APAP)

In June of 2000, Sandra L. Gibson was appointed President & CEO of the Association of Performing Arts Presenters (Arts Presenters). Since that time, Gibson has been instrumental in positioning the association to take on a leadership role in the field of performing arts presenting. Guiding the organization through the approval of a new vision, values and mission statement, Gibson recognized the need for an assessment of the field of performing arts presenting.