Help us reimagine the Strawberry Festival
After four decades of running this community favorite, Sandy Spring Museum is taking a year to rethink the event so it is mission-aligned, right-sized for our resources, and run with more assistance and input from the community.
Want to get involved in the discussions? Email us and let us know how you’d like to help.
Why taking a break now?
The festival has outgrown the museum. What started as a small gathering of museum supporters has grown into a regional event with an estimated 20,000 attendees in 2023.
Loss of volunteers. Until about 2015, the festival was almost entirely run by volunteers. Gradually as the core volunteers aged or moved away, not enough people stepped in to fill their shoes. Sandy Spring Museum’s small staff can’t run the event without about a dozen volunteers in key leadership positions who each devote about 6 months of planning towards the festival.
We want the community's help in shaping the festival moving forward. For many years, the festival celebrated the agricultural heritage of the area with a focus on crafts from the 19th century, like sheering sheep, spinning wool, and blacksmithing. For the past several years, the festival has been more like a carnival. Lots of fun but not related to the mission of the museum, which focuses on the region’s cultural heritage.