For the Old Town Kemptville BIA (BIA), 2022 can probably most accurately be described by the following three words “full dance card”. Not only will the BIA be up to its usual tricks of trying to create the conditions for businesses to be successful, but it will also continue to cultivate downtown Kemptville as North Grenville’s premier community hub for arts, culture, food and community events. To that end, next year will probably be the busiest and most ambitious year ever for the BIA and the downtown.
Here’s why:
- The first major community event of the year will start in the spring with Kemptville Buskerfest. The BIA tasked itself with creating and organizing this first-time event based on the vision of a small group of community builders and feedback from the community about its desire to see a large-scale springtime celebration to replace the departed Dandelion Festival. The organizing committee for Buskerfest was quickly created and began it’s work in the spring of 2020 with a small but enthusiastic group which has now expanded further with four sub-committees and even more volunteers. Organizers hope to draw between 3,000 to 5,000 people to our downtown to not only showcase North Grenville’s considerable local musical and artistic talent, but also it’s legendary hospitality and diverse small business community.
- The second major event of the year that will involve the BIA and the downtown is everyone’s favourite music festival, Kemptville Live Music Festival. Though it has been cancelled in 2019 and 2020, the immense task of organizing and preparing to host an expected crowd of about 25,000 people over the four days marches on. This year the BIA wants even more people who are enjoying the festival to venture downtown and explore what downtown has to offer. Many ideas are currently being tossed around with the hope of building on the festival discount program offered previously and adding another level of experience for visitors to our picturesque downtown.
- The third major event for 2022 and certainly the biggest in terms of the number of people attending, resources needed to host and the variety of experiences offered, is the 2022 International Plowing Match and Rural Expo (IPM) which will be running September 20th to 24th. Hosted primarily on the farmlands across from the Kemptville Campus, this massive event could draw upwards of 75,000 people to the site which is just a short walk away from our downtown. It will be “all-hands-on-deck” as an event of this magnitude will require well over 1,000 volunteers and in some cases results in new infrastructure being built on the site to accommodate all of the equipment, temporary structures and people that will be part of the event. With as many as 50 sub-committees involved in the planning, organizing, operations and logistics of the IPM, the BIA is getting involved with other stakeholders to determine how best to leverage this once in a lifetime opportunity for the local business community.
When you add in the fact that the BIA is still looking forward to continuing to organize all of its regular seasonal programming like Kreepy Kemptville, Old Town Christmas and others, it becomes glaringly obvious that the BIA’s dance card for 2022 is truly a full one.
