The saying goes, “many hands make light work,” but it also helps if the hands are connected to like-minded individuals.
This was exactly the case this year between the Canmore Folk Music Festival and Highline Magazine, which successfully hosted the festival pub stage at the Miners’ Union Hall. The three days of entertainment (Aug. 1-3) included Bow Valley acts Elk Run & Riot, Samm Bailey and The Raven & The Fox.
Highline publisher and editor-in-chief Kristy Davison also announced the magazine not only wants to cover and sponsor local musicians, but also help monetarily.
“We just announced tonight that we are creating a Highline Indie Music Grant for $1,000 that will go toward album recording costs for one selected independent band that is home-based in the Rockies,” Davison said.
The grant announcement is another example of why the two local organizations were a perfect fit to work together, with the festival offering a scholarship program for Canmore Collegiate High School students. The festival offers two types of scholarships, one for $1,000 for someone who is going into a post-secondary school program and the other is $100 for students in Grades 10-12. For the last two years the festival has solicited donations at its pancake breakfast, each year raising more than $2,000. Last year’s scholarship recipients were Nico Tobias, Julie Oshada, Lukas Chartrand and Carly Suddard.
“I think it was a perfect marriage, I love what they do and the leadership there fits very well with our leadership here and the vision,” said Soulafa Al-Abbasi, general manager at the Canmore Folk Music Festival Society. “It was chemistry right away and a natural fit and from them as well, and I think we can do a bit more as well for next year and see what more fun ideas we can come up with.”
The local “mountain life” magazine is no stranger to offering community events and planning, with its popular Know Your Neighbour Nights being a well known and local favourite event that also helps in promoting the local music scene and community spirit.
“We’re all about the shared folk music community, so it made a lot of sense for both of us to make it happen – again, it’s a perfect example of why we partnered,” Al-Abbasi said.
“We’ve worked with them for years, but we’ve never done anything this significant and it just came across my radar that it was a possibility to sponsor the stage,” Davison said. “I’d never thought of it before, but it was a lot of local bands and these are bands that have played at our events or I’ve played with myself.”
She says the magazine wanted to give back and at the same time inform the community on the re-launching of the magazine. Highline is now offering a new look and feel, moving to a quarterly publication from a semi-annual, doubling their local business output for the community.
“We wanted to take part in this to show the community and people who we are,” Davison said. “Everyone sees the front face of the magazine, but they don’t necessarily know us unless they come out to our events, so it felt like a total no-brainer to do it.”
