Nine New Science Festivals Announced
New festivals are always being added to the map! The Science Festival Alliance is continuously helping new science festivals get started, but this spring some communities are getting a special boost. With funding from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Science Festival Alliance launched the Science Festival Accelerator in 2016. In June, three existing festivals were named as Accelerator leads, and we are now proud to announce that nine new start-up festivals have been selected from a competitive application process. Start-ups and leads are organized into these smaller cohorts:
- Lead: Indian River Lagoon Science Festival (Fort Pierce, Florida)
- Mt. Shasta, California
- North Bay, Ontario
- Topeka, Kansas
- Lead: Flagstaff Festival of Science (Flagstaff, Arizona)
- Downey, California
- Honolulu, Hawaii
- Roswell, New Mexico
- Lead: Maine Science Festival (Bangor, Maine)
- Pensacola, Florida
- Jackson, Mississippi
- Bowling Green, Kentucky
The Accelerator is specifically designed to support new science festivals in communities with a relatively small resource base, and includes both matching sponsorship funding and professional development resources. Start-up festivals will begin celebrating sometime between the summer of 2017 and the spring of 2018.
