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Finding Charlottesville: Tom Tom Fest this Fall
One-hundred-twenty people from around Charlottesville were nominated for this year’s ‘Founding Cville’ class, and the selection committee has whittled that number down to nine recipients.
Tom Tom Founders Festival Director Paul Beyer tells us what we can expect in these coming weeks leading up to the festival’s 4th Annual fall block party: “The ‘Founding Cville’ project is meant to highlight the untold stories and then also highlight some of the big successes that have come out of Charlottesville.
Last year, some of the recipients ranged from Bill Crutchfield to Marcus Martin, Benton Calhoun and Sarah Claiborne.
The ‘Founding Cville’ project, in its second year had more than 120 nominations.
These are artists, civic leaders, entrepreneurs, folks from all over the community and it was a public nomination process.
That closed July 15.
In that time, we had a selection committee come and this included out advisory board and last year’s class of ‘Founding Cville’ recipients and they kind of passed the torch to the group.
September 1 and throughout the entire month of November, folks will see the banners go up on the mall with the portraits of the founders.
All month long, we are highlighting their profiles and then at the end of the month, we’ll have a giant reception for them as part of the fall block party.
That’ll be Friday, Sept. 25, it’ll be down at the IX Art Park and there will be all kinds of partnerships with businesses down at the IX.
We’ll celebrate these folks and recognize them publicly and offer the community a chance to meet them and talk with them.
Then on Saturday, we follow up with a giant craft fair and another full day of music and drinks and fun.
The reason we do this is because Tom Tom is a founders festival. It’s about creativity, it’s about entrepreneurship, it’s about how things are built and specifically telling about founders’ stories.
So the fall is a great opportunity to focus on local founders–folks that are making a difference here, having impacts nationally, sometimes even globally.
And then it’s a great segue to a big event, which is in April.
It’s a week-long event and last year we had 26,000 folks, we had a sold out Paramount Theatre.
That’s when it gets national and we look broad and big.
This is a perfect way to segue into the spring.”