Pickin' In The Park® welcomes the opportunity to assist your community in establishing its own weekly community music event.
Click
here to learn more about how you and your community
can acquire the
"Pickin' In The Park® Event Operations
Manual and Companion CD-Rom:
A Guide to Organizing Your Own Weekly Community Music Event"
written and developed by Lisa Jacobi & Joe Jacobi
This 60 page handbook is divided into 10 chapters that cover the structure of the event, buidling your organizing team, developing sponsor pitches, keeping the integrity of the event, signage, publicity, venue selection, and more.
The companion CD-Rom provides you with all the artwork templates (website, signage, posters, banners, ads) and Word Documents (sample press releases, articles, notices). There are no strings attached other than Pickin' In The Park® should remain a free, community event based on the spirit of open jam sessions for all types of acoustic musicians.
Excerpt from the handbook: It’s a Thursday evening in our small town of McCaysville,
Georgia. Well before six-o-clock, the local park is filling with
people setting up lawn chairs alongside the river and near the
pavilions. They It’s been a busy week for most everyone there, but as the
sun dips behind the tree tops,
Every Thursday evening since, all season long, rain or shine,
Pickin' In The Park® |
wave to their neighbors who they haven’t seen all week and
unwrap their sandwiches and pour cups of ice tea. Musicians are
walking in to all corners of the park carrying guitar, banjo and
fiddle cases. Some groups are already pickin’. Under the
oak trees, children eagerly gather around and listen to a “drum
circle” played by musicians from the area folk music club.
The Dulcimer ladies have arrived and are tuning up. 
The Pickin' In The Park® effortlessly gets underway. The atmosphere
of the park, with music and laughter coming from here and there,
makes everyone relax and start thinking about the upcoming weekend.
The community once again finds its center.
This
was not our initial vision for Pickin' In The Park®. We thought
we would just gather up a few musicians and send the word out
to others in the area to “come pick” each week. But
since we had the luxury of a few months of prep time, we decided
to bring on a sponsor & partners to help cover some of our
publicity costs. We started sending out invitations to musicians
via free press in the newspaper and on the local radio.
On
the first night of Pickin' In The Park® over 1000 people,
picnickers and musicians, showed up… more than the entire
population of our town. Taken by surprise, we realized right away
that we didn’t have a parking plan in place. But lo’
and behold, those in attendance jumped in to direct traffic flow
and assist those that needed extra help. In a way, this snag was
a benefit, as folks took immediate “ownership” of
the success of this unique weekly, community gathering.
is a place where folks get an early start on their weekend. The
numbers may vary; sometimes only 400 people attend, other nights
we top 1500. But the enthusiasm for this event on the part of
the musicians, listeners, sponsors and partners has never let
up. It now belongs to the musicians and community, and the organizing
team is just the “overseer.”