Children in a wagon at a previous Sitka Seafood Festival. Photo/BJordan
The Sitka Seafood Festival has issued a call for help. The 2016 festival was placed on hold earlier this year. Alicia Haseltine, vice-president of the festival board, says the decision was made after the event lost several of their leaders.
“Last year was our sixth year, and each year it’s continued to grow,” says Haseltine. “As it’s grown the amount of people involved kind of stayed the same, so the workload wasn’t getting distributed as much as we’d hoped. Unfortunately about half of our board members ended up leaving town including our director which makes it very difficult to continue going how it has been going.”
In previous years, the festival was run by volunteers. After year two a nonprofit was established. Now, Haseltine says they’re looking for another organization or corps of volunteers to bring the festival into the future.
“To see it continue to grow we’d like to shift focus a little bit and see if we can get a fishing organization or someone in the tourism business or someone in the culinary industry who might want to spearhead it, and we can continue working on it from there,” says Haseltine.
Current board members and volunteers are holding a meeting to discuss the future of the Sitka Seafood Festival on August 18 at 6 o’clock at the Sealing Cove Business Center.
