On Sunday December 17th, the 2nd annual Homegrown Mixer was at Blacklist Brewing. Several staff members talked about planning and preparing for the 2024 Music Festival.

Corey Jezierski, the Co-Director of Homegrown said if local bands are wanting to play in 2024, time is running out.

“One of the important things is that our performer application is open online. That opened up on Thanksgiving,” Jezierski said. “It’ll be open through New Year’s Day. So if your act or your friend’s band hasn’t applied, let’s have them get on that so we can get them involved with the festival.”

Of course, Homegrown wouldn’t be what it is today without the help of dedicated volunteers lending a hand.

“This can’t happen without volunteers, to be blunt about it. So we need people to help us out. Please, please help us. We can’t do it on our own,” Jezierski said. “The volunteers, they work the door at the venues, they help with the wristbands. But yeah, we’re always looking for people that can help us out with that.”

Deena Townsend, a returning volunteer was also at the Homegrown Mixer. She said volunteering is a wonderful way to be part of the community and seeing different venues.

“My brother is a musician and he was coming to this meeting last year and he said, ‘Why don’t you just come with me and see what it’s about?’ So I did, and I got kind of excited about volunteering,” Townsend said. “They actually do walk you through the whole thing. And it ended up being so much fun and I got to see a ton of bands. There’s some perks to volunteering.”

Townsend also said she would love to help out with Homegrown volunteering in the future.

“I’m really impressed with the people that do this. I can’t even imagine trying to organize something like that, like get the venues all together,” Townsend said. “They were even talking about trying to get similar sized bands to all be in the same venue so that they had the same equipment. I can’t even imagine doing that. They’ve been doing it for 26 years.”

Also for more information about how you can sign up to perform for Homegrown you can look here. However, for more stories with Homegrown you can read more here.