Enfield Harvest Festival to celebrate 50th year

This September, both the Enfield Harvest Festival — and the local group that hosts it — will celebrate 50 years of serving the community.

As is the case every summer, Enfield Community Council (ECC) members are hard at work planning the upcoming festival, to be held on Sept. 20 this year, from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. at the Enfield Community Center. 

“We are actually going to have an exhibit of the history of the ECC because what we started out as and what it is today is very different. It’s changed with the times,” Cortney Bailey, ECC president, said. “It started off as a coop for daycare, and then kept expanding.”

It has been over a decade since Bailey first became president, a role she took on when her son aged out of elementary school. Since she was not volunteering as a school board member anymore, she was searching for a way to serve her community locally. She decided to take on more responsibility at the ECC because she feels that the organization can truly make a difference in the lives of Enfield’s residents.

What does the ECC do?

The ECC hosts the senior citizens group that meets at the Enfield Community Center. The center also hosts mixed martial arts and fitness classes, a wide variety of teen programs (Outdoor Adventures and a new cooking program are particularly popular, Bailey said,) sewing classes and belly dancing.

The community center, located at 162 Enfield Main Rd., also provides free wireless internet with a booster, and it can be accessed by the public from the parking lot, even if the center is closed.

The ECC also runs the Enfield Summer Camp and the Enfield Community Library, open Tuesday and Thursday from 3:30 to 6:30 p.m., Saturday from 9 a.m. to 12 p.m., and Sunday from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m.

Several things in works for the ECC are: securing funds for a generator so that the community center can become an emergency center, providing one-on-one financial literacy classes for residents, creating a community justice league, and adding a small, HIPAA-complaint trailer to the building so that the Tompkins County Office for the Aging and Tompkins County Whole Health can hold classes and events.

Bailey also said that in the future the ECC would like to host Alcoholics Anonymous meetings and grief sessions, “both of which are badly needed in our area,” Bailey said.

“We desperately need volunteers,” she added. “Almost all of us work. The ones who are retired are already taking on as much of the load as they can.”

Festival plans

Every year, the Harvest Festival features a chicken barbecue, bouncy house and lawn games.

There will be a ping pong ball drop, which Bailey said has been on hiatus for a number of years and had to be cancelled last year due to high winds.

If the weather cooperates this year, a low-flying plane will drop balls on the field and children will try to catch/find them. Every ball has a number on it that can be redeemed for a prize, and each child is only allowed to turn in one ball.

It was the ping pong ball drop that first drew Bailey to the ECC. Before joining the organization, she took her son to the ball drop and was completely enchanted by the event.

“It was one of the most heartwarming things I’d ever seen,” she said of watching the older children helping the youngest ones find a ball. “It was a wonderful thing to see the kids cooperating with each other without an adult telling them they had to.”

There will also be a quilt raffle and the ever-popular cake wheel, which needs items to be donated to be successful. In the past, everything from desserts to honey to bouquets of flowers have been popular items, Bailey said.

All of the proceeds from the festival go back to fund ECC programming. “It keeps the ECC running,” Bailey said. “We have absolutely no paid positions anymore.”

The festival is looking for vendors, who can fill out an application here: https://shorturl.at/IUhIl.

The vendor fee is $30 per 8-foot-wide by six-foot-deep space. Six-foot tables are available in a limited amount for $10 per space, and the ECC encourages vendors to bring their own tables if possible. Chairs are provided to all vendors. A maximum of three spaces per vendor is allowed.

Electricity is available; bring an extension cord if you need electricity.

“We ask that all goods are politically and ‘hot topic’ neutral,” the application adds. “We acknowledge that everyone has their own views and opinions, as a center for the whole community we want to remain neutral and welcoming to all.”

Contact Colleen McKenzie for more information or any questions at: 607-342-2822 or cms326@gmail.com.