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Mission & History
WHAT IS THE ARKANSAS EARTH DAY FESTIVAL?
The Festival Mission: “Arkansas Earth Day’s Festivals are meant to broaden the environmental movement statewide and to educate and motivate people, governments, and businesses to take responsibility for a clean and healthy environment through a fun festival.”
This year’s 8th Annual Arkansas Earth Day Festival is being produced by Arkansas Earth Day Foundation on Saturday, April 23rd, 2011 from 10:00 AM to 3:00 PM. It will be an exciting day in North Little Rock, where crowds of people will gather on the Riverfront/ North Shore Riverwalk grounds to take part in the largest statewide festival to celebrate Earth Day. The celebration will be jam-packed with fun and interactive experiences designed to provide hopeful solutions that will motivate Arkansans and their families to take positive action. Families with young children, groups of youth, and couples of all ages will see a familiar festival landscape with food, shopping, games, live entertainers, and more. But all of these things will be done with a twist: All the options are healthy, eco-friendly, and socially responsible. The diverse fun and educational activities will engage, intrigue, and entertain while helping people to feel hopeful and motivated by our solutions-based approach. The event is accessible to attendees from all walks of life, especially since it is rain or shine. And it’s free!
Arkansas Earth Day’s Festivals are unique amongst other green events for a few reasons: First, we have grown exponentially since our inception as Conway Earth Day in 2004. In fact, last year’s first statewide earth day festival had nearly 10,000 people in attendance! Secondly, our organization is focused entirely on hopeful, motivating solutions to Arkansas’ environmental issues. We choose not to motivate with fear, but rather with education as our slogan “Live Green Arkansas!” suggests. We are the “warm fuzzy” of the environmental organizations with a focus on celebratory art, music, and education as environmental messaging mediums. We are a 501c3 non-profit organization, so we do not directly participate in partisan political or religious issues. All involved in the past have found it to be a perfect platform for expressing green initiatives, products, services, and ideas. We have had extraordinary involvement from all sectors of our community including commercial, industrial, non-profit, academic, grassroots, etc. We are also non-competitive with our event. Each year we spread the word about all of the earth day celebrations happening in state while offering assistance to any who desire it. Thus, if you were to choose to do an event in your area, we would spread the word about it while assisting you in program development and other aspects of planning.
WHO IS THE ARKANSAS EARTH DAY FOUNDATION?
The Organizational Mission: “The Arkansas Earth Day Foundation is a non-profit, local coalition of concerned families, inspired seekers, elected leaders, and responsible businesses working to increase community awareness of environmental issues and access to sustainable solutions through education, events, recycling, networking, products, and services.”
Arkansas Earth Day Foundation (AED) began as Conway Earth Day Foundation and was founded by April Ambrose, our Executive Director, in collaboration with the Arkansas Center for the Study of Integrative Medicine. AED is the organization that now coordinates, funds, and implements the annual Arkansas Earth Day festival.
The first festival in 2004 had only 300 people in attendance, but over the next six years it grew in size to an attendance of almost 10,000. The non-profit organization has no paid employees and produces the festival each year with college interns and volunteers just like you. All donations and proceeds from the festival are used to produce the following year’s event or for year-round environmental education activities.
