Now a community staple, the Airdrie Children’s Festival was born from one question from a five-year-old. Airdrie Paint and Blinds owner Pete Lewis had taken his children to the Calgary Zoo when his oldest daughter Maren asked him a simple question, “Who looks after the
animals?” That one question started Lewis on a path to find more opportunities for his kids and other children to learn and grow.
“I spoke with a couple of other local parents, and we all arrived at the same conclusion: We needed something more to support our own kids learning,” Lewis says. “It had to be educational, but it needed to be disguised as fun.”
Lewis discovered that his city of Airdrie, Alberta, was one of the largest cities in Canada without a major children’s festival, and as a small business owner in the city, he could do something to make a difference. He helped create a board of four members, registered as a not-for-profit society and began fundraising.
In 2018, the first annual Airdrie Children’s Festival was held.
“We wanted our festival to be different, fully inclusive, so it had to be free for everyone to attend with no marketing on site,” Lewis says. “We wanted kids to come and just be able to be kids. Everything we planned for the festival was viewed through a lens of creating curiosity, inspiring creativity or removing fear.”
The festival includes four key areas. The Entertainment Stage features local and national entertainment, and the Children’s Village provides a safe place to play with inflatable carnival games and activity centers. The Inspiration Stations offer hands-on learning opportunities for kids to learn how electricity works, how television news and sports get on the air, how the Calgary Zoo cares for endangered species and more. The festival also includes city-wide workshops where kids can learn everything from knitting to changing a tire to writing stories.
The first year saw more than 5,000 kids take part in the festivities, and over 7,000 came to the festival in 2019. Both the 2020 and 2021 festivals were canceled because of the pandemic, but the event returned in 2022. Lewis says having to cancel two years in a row was devastating to the board, the community and the kids. The board still continued to meet regularly virtually to bring the event back in 2022.
“We were very worried that we’d struggle on the financial side because the past couple of years were so difficult for so many businesses here. We were wrong,” Lewis says. “Our business community stepped up in a big way, and we were fully funded faster than ever before.”
Lewis and the other board members thought that people may be nervous to participate, but the Festival has more Inspiration Stations booked than ever before.
“It’s been two very, very long years without the festival running, but we anticipate we will see our numbers top 8000 this year,” he says.
Lewis says serving as board chair for the festival is a labor of love but has allowed him to interact with his community in ways he never imagined.
“It’s a solid relationship builder. For all the time it takes away from working in our store, the rewards come back ten-fold,” he says. “It’s the best marketing we could ever do.”
Everything comes full circle for Lewis when he sees his daughter Maren put on her Airdrie Children’s Festival pin and head to school to talk about the festival with her friends and teachers.
“Our mission is to celebrate our cultural differences by highlighting, educating and providing opportunities to teach and share within our community, region and province,” he says. “We want this event to be a difference-maker and for it to be a legacy event in our community. I think we are on the right path!”
Learn more about planning special events for your operation here.
