Grassroots of Tarboro

This Saturday, June 28th, Tarboro will host the 2nd annual Eastern Carolina Cantaloupe Festival. 

It promises to be lots of fun with more food, more music, blow-up rides for the kids, contests, arts & crafts vendors.  The town closes off a section of Saint Andrew Street and hundreds if not thousands of folks converge on our downtown.

As GOT members, this will be an excellent opportunity to promote the monthly T2S events.  An opportunity to invite the visitors back again every month for fun in our beautiful little town.   It will also allow us to contact vendors,  music groups and craftspeople who might be interested in participating in a future Tarboro's 2nd Saturdays event.

I'll be talking with the downtown merchants this week to give them a heads up if they haven't thought of it already.  Each downtown merchant should put something out on the sidewalk, just as we do for T2S, to encourage the flow of pedestrians to stroll the length of our downtown streets and see all that we have to offer.  The festival is focussed on St Andrew Street and the Courthouse Square, but with a little creativity, we can pull them out and along Main Street as well. 

I'll probably set up a table at 305 N Main (the front of the Marrow-Pitt building) with flyers and information about the Grassroots of Tarboro and Tarboro's 2nd Saturdays. Anyone interested in sitting with me?  Come on down! The more the merrier.   It might be a good time to sign up more kazoo players for the Tarboro Community Kazoo Band and we may even be able to do some fund-raising.

We, as a community trying to grow and become revitalized, need to recognize and take advantage of every opportunity to promote our town and ALL that Tarboro has to offer. 

As I browse the web, I often come upon websites where people can post comments about places they've visited or where they live. I see these as a FREE opportunity to promote Tarboro.  Each time I write a positive blurb about Tarboro, I'm putting it's name out there for people to find. People who may be looking for a nice place to live.  I also use the words "best place to live in NC" as often as I can without being too obvious.  I know that someone out there in cyberspace is wondering and searching the web for information, and I'm hoping that their search for the best place to live in North Carolina will lead them to Tarboro.

I'm proud to call Tarboro my home.  

Yesterday, we had our third monthly Tarboro's 2nd Saturday event and it just reinforced my feelings that when it comes to folks who understand community, we've got the best of the best right here in our little town.

Despite high heat, high gasoline prices and a code purple air quality index due to smoke from Hyde County forest fires, crowds of happy people visited downtown Tarboro to enjoy our street fair and share in the community spirit.  WE are revitalizing our town.  Every person who bakes cookies for the bake sale, who sings a song to entertain, who sets up a display of their art, who hangs a poster in the window, who puts a sticker on their car, who smiles at someone on the street, we are all working together to revitalize our town.

What makes Tarboro, the best place to live in North Carolina?  We do. The people of Tarboro. 

With ten days to go before Tarboro's 2nd Saturday for June, I'm feeling that little pinch of anxiety that occurs when one in charge of planning is not quite certain HOW everything will fall into place in such a short period of time.

The orderly, organized, stress-producing side of my personality is very uncomfortable with "not knowing" exactly where all the pieces are and how they fit together, while the other, more peaceful, "trust the Universe" side is content to work on what can be worked on and just allow everything to come together as it will.  Luckily side two takes charge most of the time. 

We may only have 10 days before the event, but, look at it this way, we started out with only 30 days to begin with, so we still have 1/3 of our organizing time left and we've already accomplished a lot.

The first one was not so easy, we were truly starting from scratch.  The second event was a little easier, but then we couldn't have live music so a whole dimension of planning was omitted.  This time, we've added more space to fill, more time to fill and live music to contend with, so the dynamics have changed quite a bit.  It will be interesting to see what works and what doesn't work. 

I'm learning to plan ahead a little bit, so that we can get a jump on the future months' events.  Even just a vaque idea can get wheels turning and brains storming.  I have rough plans to take us right through December, but I really need to learn either 1) how to get more people actually involved in the creation of the events or 2) how to raise more money so we can hire people to do some of the work.  I can see why and how volunteers get burned out.

How many of you readers have attended street fairs or festivals in other towns?  I'd be willing to guess that most of you have. Now, how many of you have ever given any thought as to who created the street fair or festival and what was required to make it happen? I have to say, until VERY recently, I never gave it much thought either.  Now I know that there are many pieces that all have to fit together. We need entertainment. We need the downtown businesses to participate and to draw attention to the sidewalk space up and down the blocks to keep the crowd flowing from one area to the next.  We need to schedule a variety of well-placed food vendors to satisfy the appetites of everyone young and old. We need to promote the event, and advertise. We need to design promotional materials. We need to ask for and collect donations to pay for the promotional costs. We need it to be festive. We need it to be fun. We need artists and craftspersons; things to look at and things to do.  Things for grown-ups and things for kids.  We need all the little pieces to fall together nicely.  For Tarboro's 2nd Saturdays, we not only need it to happen within the next 10 days and we need it to happen EVERY month. 

As a Friend of the Edgecombe County Memorial Library and a concerned citizen, it has been brought to my attention that the NC State legislature will be discussing additional funding of 5 million dollars to public libraries in this 08-09 budget. 

The Edgecombe County Memorial Library's portion of this funding would amount to $35,133 which is approximately half of their current book budget.  This would give the library such a boost in the ability to improve their collections in many different ways.

Please help our local library. Contact Representative Joe Tolson and ask for his support.

A simple phone call or email requesting his support in this matter could make a big difference.

Representative Joe Tolson
919 715-3024
email: Joet@ncleg.net

Now that we've had two Tarboro's 2nd Saturday events, we are kind of getting the hang of how to put the pieces together.

I'm really getting excited about the June 14th event.  Having use of the Square and music outside will make a big difference!  Keep an eye on the T2S link for June 14th ,  I've started to to list what is planned and what is getting worked on.

With two planning meetings this week, I'm sure I'll be adding more activities and participants over the next few days. 

If you wish to participate in ANY way, just let me know.  We need food, music, arts & crafts, informational booths, fund-raisers for nonprofits. This is a community event and whatever you can add is welcomed and appreciated.