One of the things that is great about the Appel Farm Festival is the support it receives from the various local governmental agencies. The county road department mows the sides of the road for the festival and allows us the use of the snow fencing (granted, they store it on our land.)

The sheriff’s and state police are always very generous with their personnel. They enjoy the event because it is non-alcohol and the genre of music isn’t conducive to rioting.

The next township over lets us borrow tower lights so people can see where they are going when they return to their cars at night. Our township allows us to borrow recycling bins so we don’t have to buy or store them. (Though we certainly do clean them.)

The only negative has been that the police in the boro next door usually end up ticketing attendees as they pass through town. Granted, they always strictly enforce the 25 mph limit, but when you have 12,000 people attending, there is likely to be a high number of people to ticket. This has really just been the police making this decision. The mayor has asked them to give a little leeway in the past and it hasn’t worked. Recently, the trade off has been that the county places a digital sign showing a driver’s speed next to the big red sign that says speeding is strictly enforced. There haven’t been complaints of the boro being a speed trap in the last few years now.

All this support is the type of thing that is supposed to happen between an arts organization and it’s community. Granted, it helps in some respects that the center is located in a rural environment where you can establish some nice relationships. On the other hand, the surrounding community has always been a bit more conservative than the employees, campers and visitors to the center. Over the last 40 years, there has been some whispering about what people assume is going on 2 miles down the road.

Very few people in the local community volunteer or attend events at the arts center. That is changing slowly now because we have started offering afterschool classes for kids and adults in recent years. The honest truth is that people 10-50 miles away know more about what goes on at the arts center than those that live within 5 miles.

This is not to imply that the people nearby are uncultured, bigotted hicks. It is just that their interests haven’t aligned with what the arts center has offered until recently. Some of that might be due to the fact that more people who work in Philladelphia are slowly creeping into the area. And some of the current group of 20 somethings were the beneficiaries of the center’s school outreach programs in their youth.

There is also a deep running loyalty and helpful ethic to the local population. One year I was stopped on the side of the road putting up signs for the festival and no less than 6 people stopped to ask if I was having car trouble in the 20 minutes I was there. Last year, with all the rain we had, right around the end of the festival, a couple farmers and their sons came riding up on their tractors and asked the executive director if we needed help pulling festival attendees out of the mud (Boy did we ever!)

Some people may not totally understand what the arts are all about and may not be comfortable with what the local gossip says it is all about, however, they do know what a person in need looks like. To some extent it may be a relief knowing how to react and participate so they do wholeheartedly.