To All Our Friends, Volunteers and Supporters:
This past year has brought many changes for everyone. For Wheatland Music that meant the cancellation of all in-person events, which included the 2020 festival. For the safety of everyone, WMO extended those cancellations to May 31, 2021. Our priority was and is in keeping everyone safe.
Our focus now is to hopefully provide an in-person festival in September. At this time, we are not sure how that festival will look. We are currently considering our options, but with the guidelines from the state continually changing, we are not able to make any definite decision at this time.
The issues that we are considering include limiting the number of tickets we sell to reduce the size of the festival; state required safety guidelines that attendees might have to follow; a possible ticket price increase for additional expenses we expect to incur; and the policies needed to keep everyone safe.
We have an active committee working on all of the above items. We hope a decision on holding a festival in 2021 can be announced no later than May 1, 2021. This timeline is fluid due to the state guidelines changing. The decision to be made by the Board in May will be whether to move forward with contingency planning for a festival, not whether to actually hold one. That decision can only come after the state announces if and under what conditions mass gatherings will be allowed. We are hoping for the best!
With the cancellation of in-person events this last year, Wheatland Music lost our main source of revenue which is ticket sales to events. While this has put a strain on our cash reserves, we have been blessed with continued support from our friends, supporters and volunteers. Words cannot express WMO’s gratitude for the financial and moral support we have received.