By James Bowler

New Winter Fest board seeks local sponsorship

Nov 24, 2014 | 6:15 AM

The first meeting for Prince Albert Winter Festival’s new board saw a lot of ideas flowing.

The need for more sponsorship for the upcoming festival stood out to its new president, Barry Mihilewicz.

“Historically we’ve had some great sponsors coming forwards, oddly enough not a lot of local business… I think that’s something we’re going to try to address.”

The board created a committee to specifically deal with gathering new sponsorships at its Sunday night meeting.

“We will have people going out and beating the bushes to try to get some sponsorship dollars from local people here,” said Mihilewicz. “This is a Prince Albert event and it brings a lot of money into the community, and a lot of local businesses do benefit from it, we hope to see a lot of local businesses step up.”

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One of the other major factors discussed at the meeting was the length of the Winter Festival in previous years.

Mihilewicz said that the group has come to a decision about how it will play out this year.

“One of the things that we all agreed on, and of course you hear this as a comment from a lot of people, the Winter Festival is too long,” said Mihilewicz. “We are going to definitely condense it down.”

He added that for 2015 the official start of the festival will begin with the Voices of the North show.

“It will go through to the following Sunday, so basically we’re looking at a 10 day festival right now,’ he explained.

This will be a good way to focus on filling each day with quality events that will offer interest to a variety of age groups.

On the subject of age groups, Mihilewicz says they will be looking at catering more to younger demographics.

“We definitely would like to see a lot more of a youth involvement,” said Mihilewicz. “We’re looking at possibly doing some events that might be specifically youth targeted.”

Most of those changes won’t be possible with how late the crew is running this year, “but there are going to be at least a couple of new events that we’re looking at,” said Mihilewcz.

“We may tweak a few other ones, I think we’re definitely look at some changes to the Country North Show, not sure what we’re doing yet with cabarets.”

He added that the board will be looking at accepting submissions for producers to help plan the Country North Show.

Finally the board is hoping to incorporate Voices of the North into the festival more.

“We’re looking at maybe some sort of an event on the Sunday that might involve fiddling or jigging or something,” said Mihilewicz. “Voices of the North is an amazing show in itself, but traditionally a good part of their audience are people from out of town, and the quality of the entertainment is amazing, so we want to definitely market that to people in Prince Albert as ‘hey this is a big part of the festival, come out to the Voices of the North, you will be amazed.’”

And it’s a two way street, said Mihilewicz, adding that it would beneficial to have those who attend the Voices of the North show check out the other events as well.

During the meeting a variety of ideas surrounding the lineup events, shuffling certain events around and even expanding others were discussed.

At this point the board is still in the early stages of planning so nothing has been solidified, but more updates on events and when they will run during the show will be in the near future.

The board will meet again on Dec. 2 to discuss putting together the rest of the committees and finding volunteers to help with planning and production.  

jbowler@panow.com

On Twitter: @journalistjim