Good evening, folks! If the Blue Ridge Virtual Eco Fair had been conducted as planned this past weekend, today I would have offered you coverage of the actual presentations, keynote addresses and activities from the event. However, event organizers made a fairly last-minute decision to postpone the online fair to next spring.
So instead, today I offer a rundown of the thinking behind the postponement, a little history of the event and a preview of what you can expect in April!
SustainFloyd and the various local business owners, thought leaders and young farmers who comprise much of the event agenda contribute so much to the Floyd community year-round, and the Virtual Eco Fair promises to showcase a lot of their combined knowledge and talent. I hope today’s story gets you excited for the event.
The Floyd County Board of Supervisors will hold its sole meeting of November tomorrow morning. I’ll have coverage on Wednesday. The Town Council meets Thursday, and I’ll be there too! Catch my story on Friday afternoon. And thanks so much, as always, for the continued interest in and support of this venture.
-Ashley
Inaugural Eco Fair pushed to next year
SustainFloyd’s inaugural Blue Ridge Virtual Eco Fair initially was not intended to be virtual. The event, built on the legacy of the Floyd Energy Festival, would be held in the fall of 2020, organizers decided. It would have a wider scope than the Energy Fest, with an expanded range of topics, experts and activities included. Then the coronavirus pandemic struck, making it unsafe to hold the event in-person. It was moved online, but scheduled for the same weekend: Nov. 14-15, 2020.
Last week, however, it became clear that national political uncertainty was looming large on everyone’s minds, and sucking up a lot of the oxygen online. “We were close to pulling it together and we realized that more than anything else, the airwaves were just so totally full of conversation about the election,” said SustainFloyd board member Woody Crenshaw. He noted that the online registration form wasn’t seeing the expected traffic. Although registrations were only trickling in, Crenshaw saw an advantage in being able to track them.
“With an in-person festival, you don’t really know who’s going to come until you open the gates and count the people,” he said. Asking people to buy tickets to the virtual event in advance meant organizers were warned of folks’ distraction. They simply didn’t have the mental capacity, it seemed, for such an event. “People had become so saturated with advertising and fake news…(they) were just unplugging,” Crenshaw said.
The event was shaping up to be quite a triumph: two full days of programming, including internationally-known keynote speakers each day. Organizers didn’t want valuable information about sustainability, climate change, tiny living, the local food economy and more to get drown out by national political static. So they postponed.
The virtual event will now be held April 24-25, 2021, the weekend after Earth Day. Crenshaw said SustainFloyd partnered with young, innovative residents of Floyd to create “a really great team,” which produced an agenda including “two days of…very rich information, tutorials, entertaining events and speakers.”
While Crenshaw emphasized that the Eco Fair will not be targeted toward any specific governmental policy or political ideology, the ideas discussed during the fair have a wider relevance than merely the intellectual curiosity of Floyd folks. “As we struggle under the weight of current events: Covid-19, an unsteady economy, dramatic weather events, and the reignited fight for racial equality, we think it vitally important to continue to draw attention to the overarching threats of climate change and environmental degradation which are clearly woven through all these issues,” the event’s homepage says.
Crenshaw said the event will be focused primarily on “inspiration,” and encouraging folks to take steps in their own lives to benefit the environment, the local food economy and their personal health. The event is for “the 20 to 40-year-old who is understanding the difficulties that will face them in their lives” related to these larger issues, he added.
The Floyd Energy Fest, a precursor to this new online fair, was held for three years at Chantilly Farm. That event featured a predominantly local slate of vendors and attendees, and its content was less varied as well. Most vendors were there to discuss alternative energy. Crenshaw said organizers of the Energy Fest “realized we had maxed out our audience” and sought to do something more ambitious in 2020.
As its name suggests, the Blue Ridge Virtual Eco Fair is more regional in scope, and will offer presentations on a broader range of topics. “We saw ‘the Blue Ridge’ less as a place than as this kind of mythical location that is interesting to people all over the country,” Crenshaw said.
Holding the event virtually presents new opportunities, he said. In addition to the fact that folks from all over can attend the fair, organizers could also recruit speakers and vendors from outside of the New River Valley.
“We ended up not only kind of expanding the footprint through its name, but we ended up with two really well-known, international speakers, to kind of set the tone for then having a lot of local content from local businesses and people out on the frontiers of sustainable living,” Crenshaw explained.
The first day’s keynote speaker is Patrick Holden. Holden is the founding director and chief executive of the Sustainable Food Trust, based in the United Kingdom. On day two, Dr. Zach Bush will kick off the programming. Bush founded The Farmer’s Footprint, a nonprofit that seeks to develop root-cause solutions for human and ecological health.
While including international heavy-hitters on the program is an exciting development, Crenshaw was quick to promote the wide array of local talent on the agenda as well. Haden Polseno-Hensley, a co-founder of Floyd’s beloved Red Rooster Coffee Roasters, is slated to discuss “Sustainability as a Business Model.” A representative from Seven Springs Farms in Check, Va. will present on “Filling a Niche: Supplying Organic Growers.” Kristy Ratcliffe, who was mentioned in Saturday’s newsletter about Death Cafes, will explain the concept of green burial.
Crenshaw has also curated a variety of “Voices of Floyd” to showcase the knowledge of Floyd’s young folks. This group of about 15 artists, farmers and back-to-the-landers will discuss “why they’re here (in Floyd) and why they’re living this lifestyle,” Crenshaw said.
Crenshaw described the overarching theme of the event as “live locally, act globally.” He said he hopes that by the time April rolls around, reception to the event is more enthusiastic and people have the time and attention to dedicate to its important topics.
“We’re parking the event for about five months, and hopefully at that point we’ll have clarity on the political front and we’ll have…maybe a light at the end of the tunnel as far as the pandemic is concerned, and people will be ready to open up and show their interest in some of these very important issues that face us,” Crenshaw hoped.
While some aspects of the Virtual Fair will only be available to registrants contemporaneously, such as live activities and giveaways, much of the content will be archived online and available after the fact. “We saw this as an opportunity to gather stories and information that would be able to be shared,” Crenshaw said.
Tickets are $15 and any proceeds from the event will help support the various initiatives of SustainFloyd, including the Floyd Farmers Market, he explained. The farmers market costs about $5,000 to host each year, and SustainFloyd strives to keep the cost to participating farmers low. That necessitates fundraising throughout the year.
You can register for the Blue Ridge Virtual Eco Fair online now. For more information about the event, including the full agenda, visit https://blueridgeecofair.com/.