We had the pleasure of hearing about the Big Ears Festival (BEF) organization from Casey Fox, Director of Development for Big Ears Festival, a non-profit entity. We learned that BEF does many more projects and events than just the Big Ears Festival each year. Casey is responsible for planning, organizing, and directing the organization’s fundraising activities and VIP festival experiences.
Even though the Big Ears Festival is their flagship event, they have several impact areas as a nonprofit. The Arts Presenting Impact Area focuses on artists of all kinds demonstrating their skills. Along with this is the Impact Area of Arts Access where students could participate firsthand with all types of arts projects with the artist which is a great mentoring opportunity. They also have a Community Impact focus on Arts, Education and Engagement which exposes students to the Arts ecosystem to help them discover and dream about possibilities for themselves. Last year, BEF’s work resulted in 175 hours of free arts education, 250 local K-12 students, and thirty local partner organizations.
Casey gave us an overview and impact of the 2023 Big Ears Festival, their Flagship Event. The event was over 4 days in sixteen venues with 234 shows. There were 135 artists participating along with 128 volunteers that hosted 45,000 visitors. It is hard to believe that 70% of the attendees are not from the Knoxville area and last year they had visitors from forty-eight states and twenty-four countries and many of the U.S. visitors are from major metros and many come back each year. The Economic Impact from the 2022 Big Ears Festival was huge for the Knoxville metro area. It resulted in a $36.1 million local economic impact which is equivalent to 377 full-time job equivalents and resulted in $2.6 million tax expenditures. BEF works closely with the city of Knoxville, KAT, and the Downtown Knoxville Association to make this event a success. The festival started back in 2009 and then did not start again until 2014 when the Aslan foundation jumped in in 2013 to help support the festival so they could restart. In the 2015, Big Ears Festival received their nonprofit status so they could do more for the community. After they held festivals from 2014 through 2019, COVID hit in 2020 and there was no festival for the two years of 2020 and 2021. However, it started again in 2022 and has been going strong and growing larger the last three years. In fact, the 2024 Big Ears Festival (March 21-24) is getting close to being another sellout event soon so get your tickets now! www.BigEarsFestival.org