Community Importance

Much of the festival’s art is positioned around Heritage Park’s pond.

The festival is an essential part of summer life in Westerville and the surrounding area. Festivals of this nature are ways that a community can come together and celebrate itself. According to Ros Derrett in Festivals & Regional Destinations: How Festivals Demonstrate a Sense of Community & Place, “Festivals and events demonstrate the popular definitions of a sense of community through offering connections, belonging, support, empowerment, participation, and safety. The sort of informal participation afforded by festivals and events provides residents with a sound overall view of their community” (38). Since Westerville doesn’t have many other informal coming-together opportunities, the Music and Arts Festival is one of the only ways for community bonding and celebration to occur. Furthermore, as stated by Insun Sunny Lee, Timothy Jeonglyeol Lee, and Charles Arcodia in The effect of community attachment on cultural festival visitors’ satisfaction and future intentions, “For Americans, festivals and the occasional accompanying parade are excuses for people to get together. They are moments of special significance in community life” (38). Like other Americans, the people of Westerville enjoy excuses to come together and spend a couple of days forgetting their problems. The fact that the festival occurs every year (even taking place virtually during the COVID-19 pandemic) demonstrates its importance to the Westerville community. On top of this, local events like the Westerville Music and Arts Festival bring revenue into the community as well as tourists from other cities and states. Lofy talks about artists coming from far away to attend the festival, including from Florida, more and more often.

Festival-goers enjoy an evening concert at the festival.

In folklore, festivals are a way for like-minded people to meet each other and celebrate their love for a shared interest. The Westerville Music and Arts Festival is just one of many examples of this. The city of Westerville is only 15 miles from Ohio’s capital, Columbus, which hosts its own arts festival every summer. Despite Columbus’ festival being larger scale and taking place nearby, there is a loyal group of people who attend the Westerville festival each year. This can be related back to identity and expression. The people of Westerville see the local festival as something more personal and representative of them, making them feel more attached to it. Furthermore, many of the performers and artists from the festival are people that they might people know from the community, rather than in Columbus festival (where artists come from all over the country). As said in Festival Places: Revitalising Rural Australia by Chris Gibson and John Connell, “More than anything else this sense of totally embracing community distinguishes urban and rural festivals” (8). Westerville isn’t rural, but rather suburban, but the gap still exists (though it is smaller) between a place like Westerville and a city like Columbus and the same logic can be applied. Like rural people, the inhabitants of Westerville decide to go to the local festival because it celebrates them and their community rather than the Columbus festival, which is far less personal and more commercialized. On top of this, as Lofy mentions, the festival massively benefits the local economy. According to him, an economic impact study found that the indirect spending from the festival brought around a million dollars to Westerville businesses each year, making this another reason that local people would want to go to the nearby festival.

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