As every year since 1972, with the lone exception of 1974, the Community Festival, aka ComFest, has rallied social justice and arts activists in Columbus, Ohio, to the Party With A Purpose.
This awesome event is totally volunteer-driven with absolutely no corporate sponsorship, and has grown to encompass three days of continuous music on five stages, social justice and healing workshops, spoken word performances, kids activites, and a lively street fair.
In 2016 I volunteered at the Comfest Museum, shown here with the late Sue Urbas’s skirt of many Comfest shirts behind me.
One of the other volunteers on my shift was Anastacia Tomson, a doctor and activist from South Africa, here in the U.S. on a Mandela Washington Fellowship.
Some of the old Comfest volunteer T-shirts hung on the walls, including the royal blue “United We Stand” shirt from 1985 and the pink “Peace and Harmony” shirt from 1986, which my ex-husband Ted Wilson Eakins and I designed. The red T-shirt in the other photo was the first one to feature, in 1982, the Hopewell Indian symbol that became the permanent logo of Comfest. Ted and I brought the Hopewell symbol to the other festival organizers for adoption.
Two photos from the 1982 Comfest feature our band Townsend Wilson & Friends, with Ted on bass, Mary Colleen Russell Townsend on vocals, Gary Hang on keyboards and me on guitar (not pictured was our awesome bongo player, whose name is sadly lost to the mists of time…).
The link to the official Comfest site is http://www.comfest.com/index.php
Let Us Live Like We Mean It! 