12 New Festival Initiatives Receive Awards
From a festival sparked by a top military college, to a new science pavilion within a Montana powwow, we’ll soon see new science celebrations emerging across the US. Thanks to the financial support of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, 12 new festival initiatives will receive matching grants, travel support and mentoring from the Science Festival Alliance. The 12 science festivals all represent new or dramatically expanded events serving communities with a relatively small resource base (as compared to major metro markets). Each awardee will start a new independently operated festival initiative in their region before the end of 2014. Awardees include initiatives in the following areas:
- Ashland, Oregon
- Bowling Green, Kentucky
- Brownsville, Texas
- Charleston, South Carolina
- Dayton, Ohio
- Fort Pierce, Florida
- Jackson Hole, Wyoming
- Jonesboro, Arkansas
- Missoula, Montana
- Roanoke, Virginia
- Schenectady, New York
- Youngstown, Ohio
The 12 awardees were selected from almost three-dozen applicants, each of which presented compelling visions for the role a science festival could play in their region. The finalists chosen for awards distinguished themselves as being a particularly good match for this Sloan Foundation-funded program. However, the Science Festival Alliance hopes to support the work of all of the applicants, regardless of whether they received this award. Four established lead science festivals are working with the Science Festival Alliance on this project: the Wisconsin Science Festival, the St. Petersburg Science Festival (Florida), SCOPE Science & Technology Days (Missouri), and the Colorado Springs Science Festival. Additionally, three national collaborators are assisting with the project: the Coalition for the Public Understanding of Science (COPUS); the Association of Science-Technology Centers (ASTC), and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). If you are interested in collaborating with a science festival in one of the regions listed above please contact us
