Welcome to our new website – we hope you’ll like it.
For starters, let me fill you in on some of the recent activities of the Cooperative. The DRMC Board of Directors, who oversee all of the undertakings of The Deep Roots Music Cooperative, has recently been going through a Strategic Planning Process with assistance from The Acadia Centre for Social and Business Entrepreneurship and funding from ACOA. This project is on-going as we work to develop a multi-year business plan. As well, we have been diligently working to broaden the scope of activities that take place annually under the umbrella of the Cooperative.
The Festival, is our largest event in the Deep Roots year and our new Programmer, David O’Leary has been hard at work putting together this year’s line-up. Other examples of our activities include a number of concerts (two Steve Poltz concerts, Stan Carew with Breeze & Wilson, and Kate Hammett-Vaughan & Bill Coon, the Benefit for Haiti, the Blue Valentine fundraiser and our recently announced Emerging Artists “Unearthed” project (which will connect with Mud Creek Days and the Festival). We have many new and exciting plans set to develop, and plenty of opportunities for volunteers to become involved in the ongoing work that the Cooperative is doing. We would love to have more people join us for activities throughout the year.
As we expand our Cooperative opportunities it has become clear that we need to physically grow as well and so to that end we have undertaken several major activities.
The first is to create and staff a new General Manager position. The person who fills this position will be handling the day-to-day business and management of all of the activities of the Cooperative. (The actual management of the Festival is not a concern at this time and will probably remain that way as long as Lisa is prepared to act as Festival Coordinator, and lead our wonderful Festival Committee. In fact, it is Lisa’s work, along with the help of all of the other wonderful Festival Volunteers, which is allowing the Cooperative to begin its expansion in earnest.)
The second is to locate and rent a Deep Roots Music Cooperative office. After years of renting an office during festival time and then storing lots of stuff, and cramming the bare necessities of an office into a space upstairs at The Odd Book (for which we were extremely grateful), we have now secured a permanent Cooperative office on Main Street in Wolfville. (This office is in the DOWNSTAIRS of the Box of Delights Book Store.) Although it is not meant to be the “Festival Office” it will certainly appear that way for the months surrounding the Festival. For the other nine or ten months of the year though, it will be the Cooperative Office. It is the hope of the Board that as the Cooperative becomes more recognized as an entity, the community will begin to understand what a benefit the Deep Roots Music Cooperative can be, not just at Festival time but throughout the year.
Peter Mowat
Board President
Deep Roots Music Cooperative