Hello friends. A lot has happened since we last corresponded, asking for your feedback about Spring 2021. We heard you, and are tremendously grateful for all of your thoughtful comments and incredible kindness.
Many factors have informed this difficult decision. Strawberry has a responsibility to protect the health and safety of festival attendees, staff, vendors, performers, and local residents, as well as our civic responsibility to help stop the spread of COVID-19. The CDC categorizes festivals as posing a high risk of community transmission and there is currently a state mandate in place that festivals cannot take place. Federal officials have recently stated that the timeline for widespread vaccination is late July and a return to normal activity is anticipated sometime before Christmas. Therefore, we feel our best path forward is to spend this time cultivating a truly authentic Strawberry experience, for 2022.
Our mission is to preserve our Americana music camping festival culture. In careful consideration of your feedback, we have become confident that it will not be the real deal until we all feel safe being there. To feel like Strawberry, it is essential that kids, elders, and everyone in between are able to play, sing, dance, eat, drink, laugh, and love (occasionally with wild abandon). We will only endeavor to produce events that meet the Strawberry standard of quality, and will not try to replace that with something else.
Tickets to the Spring 2020 Strawberry Music Festival have more value than ever. We understand that some Spring 2020 ticket holders will not be able to attend next year, and others still will not be able to attend at all, so we have revised our ticket policy accordingly.
We are collectively invested in preserving our Folk/Americana music community, and way of life. There are few who have escaped the impact of this deadly virus, and we are all sharing in this burden together. It is more important than ever that we live our core values, especially in business. Performers are facing incredible challenges in routing and building a financially solvent tour, while staying healthy and safe. You may recall that, at the onset of the pandemic, Strawberry paid full deposits to our performers. This gave them, and their team, some sense of stability, at a time of total turmoil. In return, many of them have renewed their commitment and enthusiasm for a return to the Strawberry stage, so you can expect the lineup to be largely the same for 2022. Our continued collaboration with the non-profit, Rock In Road, furthers their mission to enhance and extend The Strawberry Way. We also plan to support the Nevada County Fairgrounds with an additional Brush Crew weekend in 2021. Strawberry continues to work with all of its community partners to ensure that we can come back better than ever, together, in 2022.
We are looking forward to the most epic gathering of friends, family, and music lovers. The reason we are able to look forward with such enthusiasm is because of your support. While this pandemic is unlike any challenge we have faced before, we feel that Strawberry is uniquely poised to survive, and even thrive, because of our past experience, and because we are a tightly knit, multi-generational community. Strawberry truly is YOUR festival and will be worth the wait. Together, we can turn these lemons into delicious Strawberry lemonade.
We cannot wait to get back to the business of making festival. Please stay tuned for more news and we hope to see you there in 2022!
