3) Another popular summer festival in the wine country has been canceled for 2024. (The first being the three-decade-old Bodega Seafood, Art & Wine Festival.) This time, the organizers of Napa Porchfest — a music festival that takes place on the porches of historic buildings across the City of Napa, beloved by locals and tourists alike — are reportedly calling off the event because they want to focus on other priorities, and the festival is a huge suck of bandwidth. Unlike the Bodega festival, though, there are pretty solid plans to bring Porchfest back in 2025. Here’s the whole deal, courtesy of the Napa Valley Register: “Napa County Landmarks said the group is looking to hand over the work to some of its longtime organizers, giving the festival new life in 2025. Architect Juliana Inman, a then board-member of the nonprofit, was the driving force behind its 2011 debut. The group has been the main sponsor of the event every year since, except for a pandemic-related pause in 2020. The 2023 event, held on the last Sunday in July, drew more than 10,000 people to downtown Napa and areas surrounding Fuller Park. Hundreds of musicians performed outside 73 homes that year, the largest grouping in its history, Micah Malan, the festival’s music director, said at the time. The cost of admission is zero, similar to dozens of similar ones that happen across the country — each taking its inspiration from the one that started in Ithaca, New York in 2007. Putting it on, though, is not free. Napa County Landmarks Executive Director Christine Madrid French said the group decided to move away from the event to better focus on its core mission of ‘historic preservation advocacy, policy and education.’ She said she was tasked with focusing and reinvigorating the group’s mission when she took over in August of last year — and moving away from Porchfest was necessary to do just that.” So now, the Landmarks group is trying to set up a separate nonprofit to run Porchfest in the future. Anyone with interest in donating or sponsoring “can send a note to [email protected],” the Register reports. “And, for those who don’t want to wait for 2025, San Rafael is having its Porchfest in September.” (Source: North Bay Bohemian & Napa Porchfest & San Rafael Porchfest & Napa Valley Register; paywall)
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