San Diego GreenLife

by Laura Silver

The Annual EarthFair Children's Parade (photo credit Carolyn Chase)

The 21st Annual EarthFair will be held on April 18, 2010 from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. in Balboa Park, San Diego. If it seems a little early to be talking about it, that’s because you aren’t responsible for creating it.

EarthFair remains the world’s largest annual environmental fair and Earth Day celebration, with hundreds of green-related exhibitors and non-profits, and an average visitor count of more than 60,000 people. In addition to being the 21^st EarthFair, the coming event will mark the 40^th anniversary of the first Earth Day celebration here in the U.S.

An event this size doesn’t spring up like a mushroom overnight. Nor does it last for more than 20 years without some powerful motivation and a strong organizing effort. EarthFair is a San Diego fixture and a tradition, yet if you asked the average attendee who produces it, s/he probably wouldn’t know. Most folks don’t even know the name of the event, just referring to it as “Earth Day in Balboa Park.”

It’s time to unmask the dedicated perpetrators of this amazing event — and the months of effort they put in striving to make it look easy. (In the interests of full disclosure, I should probably mention that I am one of those perpetrators — though just one small cog in a set of gears made up of hundreds volunteers who work on EarthFair every year.)

EarthFair is produced by the local non-profit group San Diego EarthWorks, with the help of an average of 400 volunteers. About 40 of those volunteers are long-term, die-hard EF “lifers”, but the remainder are preponderantly recruited and trained new each year — many from local high school students fulfilling their volunteer service hours. Yet every year, the Fair blooms anew, with an amazingly small number of problems and issues to overcome.

How EarthFair Began

The first EarthFair in Balboa Park was held in April of 1990. It was designed as a one-off event to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the first Earth Day in 1970.

Several local environmental groups had small events planned—teach-ins, coastal cleanups, something called “Earth Day on the Bay” — but someone, (whose identity is lost in the mists of time), put out a flyer asking for more ideas on how to promote Earth Day. The flyer set a meeting date for interested participants.

Enter Carolyn Chase, looking for a life change and a new direction for her energies. She had a strong interest in environmental issues but was not (yet) an activist — just someone seeking a new purpose, a way to contribute that would give her life meaning.

Chase thought that the Earth Day planning meetings were ready-made for “one stop shopping”. She could meet with various groups, look over the options, and decide where to place her efforts. She attended the meeting advertised on the flyer, and ended up joining a committee to expand the Earth Day celebrations.

By virtue of being unaffiliated with existing groups, Chase had time to work on hatching something more that another adjunct to the already-planned events. “I thought it could be more than a few tables with literature, which was all the other committee members were proposing” she says. Her vision ultimately put her in charge of what became the largest of all the 1990 events.

After recruiting her somewhat reluctant husband, Chris Klein, to design maps and assist with planning and logistics, EarthFair began to grow beyond anyone’s original expectations. The committee had to decide what the event would entail, reserve Balboa Park, find sponsors and exhibitors, locate suppliers of everything from booths to traffic-control barriers, and enlist volunteers to help with all aspects of the Fair, before, after, and on the day.

“It was a frightful political process,” says Chase. “Since I was new, and had no axe to grind, my main job became that of peacemaker between the groups. Someone had to protect the practical/logistical people from the political people just so that anything could get done.”

But get done it did, and well enough to garner local coverage that was picked up by national news outlets. The first, and expected-to-be-only, EarthFair became a local media event.

Still, when it was successfully completed, the exhausted producers were mostly grateful that it was over, and went back to their lives.

“But the next year we started getting inquiries asking when the Fair was going to be,” says Chase. “There was such a high interest that it became a catalyst for continuing. Again, some of the previous committee members started talking about doing something smaller. I thought it would be better to have it not happen at all than to not happen at its full potential.”

So once again, they were off and running — and ever since Carolyn Chase and Chris Klein have been the heart of the effort to produce EarthFair.

Planning and Producing EarthFair — A Calm Context of Integrity

Rather than continue with a motley collection of local environmental groups, Chase and Klein recruited a Board of Directors and founded the non-profit San Diego EarthWorks to put the event on a 501c3 footing.

SDEW’s Board is the type referred to as a “working board”, meaning the members do more than meet and vote. They participate in the planning and execution of all the group’s events and fundraisers. The Board, along with particularly committed — and logistically oriented — volunteers, forms the management core of EarthFair.

“We try to recruit practical and logistically-minded Directors,” says Chase. “It would be impossible to produce an event of this size amid political infighting.”

While Earth Day itself is April 22, the EarthFair is always scheduled for the closest Sunday that SDEW can reserve Balboa Park. Planning for the April event starts in late December or early January each year, when notices are sent out to previous exhibitors, sponsors, and volunteers — these days, primarily by email.

Klein, a software engineer, has managed over the years to automate a large amount of the EarthFair registration process with online databases, creating nearly “paperless” registration and tracking. Exhibitors and volunteers can complete the entire registration process online.

Exhibitors can choose their top three preferences for location, download logistics and setup information, and check their exhibitor history from the web site. Volunteers can review “job descriptions” and choose the time(s) and location(s) they want to volunteer.

Because of the length of the event, and the number of volunteer opportunities, many high school students are able to fulfill their entire annual requirement for community-service hours by assisting at EarthFair. Of course, they have to actually work at the Fair, because accountability is one of the hallmarks of this event.

“One of our primary jobs as the producers of EarthFair is to manage the integrity of the process,” says Chase. “We hold our exhibitors, our volunteers, and ourselves accountable.”

This emphasis on integrity plays out in many ways. Would-be exhibitors can be turned away if their product or service is clearly unrelated to the spirit of EarthFair, also if their appearance at the event is judged to be “greenwashing”, or merely an attempt to take advantage of the large number of visitors that the Fair draws.

Volunteers who think they can show up for their shifts, then “disappear” for several hours, will find their managers have kept track. Vanishing students who expect community-service hours will be sadly disappointed at the end of the day.

While there is not the same kind of direct consequence for adult volunteers who do not keep their commitments, records are kept by each area/function manager of which volunteers show up and what kind of job they do. Volunteers can be “fired” or not allowed to come back if they cause problems, or fail to live up to their commitments.

All the managers and producers of the event hold themselves to the same standards. Area and “function” managers begin their preparation work months to weeks before the event, fitting their efforts around work and home life — all without pay. Below is a list of just some of the functions overseen by these volunteer managers:

“Our volunteers know they make a difference, and many of them come back every year,” says Chase. “We’ve seen people grow up at this event. Volunteers who started in high school, graduated, went to college got jobs, married and had babies, and still come back whenever they can. Several are now managers or key volunteers we know we can count on year after year.”

While Chase and Klein work with the exhibitors and handle much of the logistical preplanning for the overall event, the most important function they serve, according to Chase, is to “provide a calm context of integrity in which everyone else can express themselves”.

There is no micro-management among EarthFair managers or volunteers. The emphasis is on finding reliable, committed people with a knack for getting things done — then putting them in charge of key parts of planning and oversight.

Once they’ve proven themselves, key volunteers are trusted to complete their tasks in whatever way seems most efficient to them. If there are concerns or questions, long-time managers, or Chase and Klein are happy to provide suggestions and troubleshooting.

EarthFair Command Central

Central planning for EarthFair takes place in the downstairs offices of Chase and Klein’s Pacific Beach home. Board and Manager meetings are held in the ground-floor living room.

A few years ago the Board of Directors debated renting outside office space, but ultimately chose to put the money to use for further environmental events, and into seasonal pay for Chase and Klein, whose prodigious EarthFair efforts had been strictly on a volunteer basis for a decade and a half.

Chase has become the public face of the Fair, dealing with the media and sponsors. Over time, much of the logistical planning shifted to Klein’s hands — and computers. For years information on how the event was planned and executed resided primarily in Chris Klein’s brain, but an event this size cannot afford to have any one person who is irreplaceable. In an effort to make that information accessible to others and to preserve the “institutional knowledge” held by long-time volunteers, Klein constructed an online forum..

For the last three years, managers have been able to keep records of what they do, and when they do it — records that are accessible to any other manager or key volunteer. Files, contracts, photos, and other backup documentation can be uploaded to the forum for the benefit of new managers, or as reminders of what needs doing next year.

This has made it easier for managers to shift to new areas or functions, and for Chase and Klein to delegate some of an otherwise overwhelming workload.

One of the largest and most important areas of effort in the production of EarthFair is obtaining volunteers. While there is a core group that returns year after year, the event requires around 400 volunteers — most of whom have to be recruited and trained anew each year. How that is done will be the subject of the next article.

Next in the “Behind the Scenes at EarthFair” series: You Need How Many Volunteers? Are You Nuts?