ComFest has announced they only have enough money in the bank to fund one more festival. In an appeal on its home page, the volunteer group behind the free June weekend in Goodale Park says that “without additional support, 2027 could be ComFest’s final year.”
The appeal puts the cost of running ComFest at roughly $300,000 a year. Police and security costs alone nearly doubled this year, it says, while the festival’s main source of income has fallen. That income has been alcohol sales. “Folks just don’t drink like they used to (which is fine!),” the appeal reads, and a festival “primarily sustained by alcohol sales is no longer viable.”
Over the past 10 years, ComFest has drawn down nearly $250,000 from reserves built up over the 40-plus years before that. The appeal calls this a transition period, one where the festival “has to adapt or perish.”
The ask is $5 a month. ComFest wants people to sign up as sustaining members toward a $100,000 goal, and to fill out a community survey on what the festival means to them and what they’d like to see in its future. Anyone can come to a General Planning Committee meeting, with “no experience or commitment needed.” The next one is November 19th at 7:30 p.m. in the Goodale Park shelterhouse, the last in-person meeting before the committee’s winter virtual schedule starts.
ComFest started in 1972 at 16th and Waldeck, put on by activists who wanted people to know what their community organizations had to offer. More than 50 years later, it calls itself “one of the longest-running volunteer-run community festivals in the country.” It’s still free to get into and still takes no corporate sponsors, and since 1997 it has given out more than $700,000 in community grants. This year’s festival ran June 26th-28th, the last weekend of June on the summer festival calendar.
The appeal signed off saying: “With or without a festival, remember to live every day the ComFest way.”
