Leader
Sarah Kennedy
Location
11111 Euclid Avenue Cleveland, OH 44106
We are excited to announce that the Lake Erie Folk Fest has a new home and new partnerships for our February 3, 2024, festival, and also a matching grant to help us raise funds for the big move! Thanks to a generous gift from the Fowler Family Foundation, every gift to this campaign will be doubled, up to $2,500.
After years of searching, we have found the best space to allow the fest to grow, to make it accessible to our large and growing community, and to help us meet our goal of sharing the music we love with younger audiences. Please come visit us in February, when LEFF moves to a new space in Case Western Reserve’s Thwing Center, in partnership with WRUW-FM 91.1, Case Western Reserve University’s college radio station.
In its first seven years, the Lake Erie Folk Festival grew to be a cornerstone of Northeast Ohio's traditional music community, thanks to the support of people like you. The festival has drawn visitors from five counties and three states to Greater Cleveland in the otherwise dark days of February, a bright spot in the cultural calendar and an important anchor in growing and sharing the riches of the region's traditional music scene.
The Case Western Reserve University campus is in the heart of Northeast Ohio's largest arts and culture hub, and WRUW is the preeminent college radio station in our region. We're happy to be bringing all the resources of this new home and partnership to our traditional music community.
This year's festival includes all the free daytime workshops, performances and jam sessions that you've grown to love, as well as an evening concert packed with local, regional and national talent. For updates and details about Lake Erie Folk Festival, visit our festival website here. For more information about Northeast Ohio Musical Heritage Association, and to meet some of our new board members, stop by our NEOMHA website.
We're already booking amazing artists for this year's festival. We're also teaming up with our new partners at WRUW to find more ways to engage the community on and around the CWRU campus. We look forward to welcoming students, both from the university and from local public schools, residents from the adjacent neighborhoods and visitors from several states to participate in this musical celebration.
Our top job now is hospitality, to make sure visitors can enjoy good food and drink along with great music, and to make navigating our new home, whether by car, on foot or via public transportation easy and accessible.
We support and celebrate traditional music in our region by offering spaces for people to play, hear and learn about a diverse array of music that's been handed down over generations. We are happy to be able to host a thriving, engaged community of musicians and audiences who love hearing them, and excited to be able to share these traditions with new generations of music-lovers.