by Michele Courtney

Hosting a kite festival is a great way to utilize large open spaces, generate income and wow your community. Now that the Bourbonnais Township Park District has soared through two successful kiting events, it's time to share our highflying secrets with you. As the event organizer, I designed this article to help you land a kite festival for your agency.

First, fact-finding

Thanks to the Internet, finding information about kiting is like riding on a jet stream. I was able to find online a plethora of kite stores, kite magazines, kite-making Web sites, and kite clubs. My main focus was to find a local kite team that would be willing to perform demonstrations, so that I could set a date for the first Bourbonnais Township Park District Perry Farm Kite Festival. Getting names and phone numbers of some Chicagoland kiters from Kite Harbor, a kite retail store in Oak Park, was like hitting pay dirt.

One thing you need to know about the kiting community is that its members are extremely friendly and helpful. One call led to another, more names, more information and the American Kitefliers Association or AKA. I learned that a "must" for our guest list was the Chicago Fire Kite Team. Not only is the Chicago Fire a local team, they are also the reigning national champions. I soon found team captain Eric Wolf and we set a date during April, National Kite Month. Setting the date around the availability of kiting talent is very important. Without professional kiters, you have no wind behind your event.

Your event options

Kite festivals can range from simple family flies to more intensive sport competitions, kite-making lessons to kite-making competitions, single-line

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flying to battles between Rokkakus (pronounced roke-cock-coo), a Japanese kite style. For the event at Perry Farm Park we included AKA-sanctioned sport kite competitions, fun family flying, learn-to-fly lessons, Rokkaku battles, indoor flys, candy drops, kite-making workshops, single-line flying, a night fly, a kite exhibit, Caribbean band with dinner and a kite raffle.

The economics of it all

You can plan anything you want, but paying for it is another story. Because we developed this kite festival on the fly, after the fiscal budget had already been planned, we had limited funds (in our case, $4,000). The event was going to cost around $11,000, so collecting funds from sponsors was paramount.

I followed some of the suggestions from the AKA Kite Organisers Manual. This little gem of an instruction booklet is online and available to American Kitefliers Association members (www.aka.kite.org). We charged $350 for seven field sponsorships: Family, Sport Kite, Single Line, Fighter, Learn To Fly, Wind Garden and Ballet. Staff made field marker signs shaped like a sport kite out of plywood and painted sponsor names on them.

A local bank sponsored the Kids Week kite-making event for $1,000. Kids Week involved many local schools. We developed packets for school administrators with lesson plans for kite science, kite math, kite history and kite patterns. We figured that the more kids we involved in Kids Week, the more spectators we would have onsite spending money.

We secured six Rokkaku sponsors at $500. A Rokkaku is a six-sided Japanese fighter kite that has been used for centuries to settle land and other disputes. The last kite up in the sky wins, and Rokkaku pilots are programmed to use whatever means possible to sabotage other kites.

In the second year, we decided to make our Night Fly a more choreographed event and managed to get a company from Florida called Kiteman Productions, which specializes in kite pyrotechnics, to travel the distance. It was pricey, but due to the events of September 11 and schedule cancellations, Kiteman performed at a huge cost reduction. A local pizza corporation agreed to be the Night Fly sponsor for $3,000. The company earned the rights to sell its food during the festival and associate its name with the spectacular Night Fly show.

In my experience, if you are creative and your phone skills are up to par, you can collect lots of money from sponsors. Sponsor benefits included advertising space in the festival brochure, corporate name on the back of the festival t-shirt, complimentary dinner and Night Fly tickets, a hyperlink on the kite festival event Web site, name mentioned in editorial space and free collector kite pins.

Luring the kite flyers

Now; one team of national champions hardly makes a kite festival. You need as much kiting talent as you can accommodate. The more kiters, the

30 Illinois Parks and Recreation

1,000 Tennis Balls How a kite festival lead to the USA Tennis program at Bourbonnais For me, part of the challenge of producing an event is the creative way to raise money and in-kind donations. For the kite festival, I needed 1,000 tennis balls to place on top of step-in metal stakes to mark kite fields. So, using the associate member listing in Illinois Parks & Recreation magazine, I called the Midwest Section of the United States Tennis Association (USTA) for names of area tennis facilities. With two names and two phone calls, I had all the used tennis balls that I could handle. Because Nancy Watland of the Homewood-Flossmoor Park District Racquet and Fitness Center is who she is, the topic of USTA programs was bound to enter our conversations. Plus, it was difficult to meet Watland, a USTA professional, take some 500 free tennis balls from her and just leave. We chatted about improving the current tennis programs at Bourbonnais and how to capitalize on our upcoming captive audience, 120 kids that sign up for our summer Funtime Day Camp every year. Watland told me how the park district could earn $5 per camper per month by just involving them in an USTA Rallyball program. The fact that we did not have tennis facilities was not an issue. As an official USA Tennis site our park district received many benefits. We purchased portable inside nets (Zig Nets) for $90 each and brand new junior tennis racquets for $8 apiece. We set up inside a gym, added kids and some soft tennis balls and voila, we hod a grass-roots tennis program. Our camp counselors were able to attend a USA Tennis teaching and coaching workshop before the program started. The summer camp program went very well and it was a thrill to see raw tennis talent out of kids who would have never had the opportunity to even hold a tennis racquet, much less learn to play. We've since expanded the tennis program by using city-owned public courts. Now we have all levels of tennis programs available to the public in our fall 2002 brochure. Thanks, USA Tennis and Nancy Watland, for being there. - Michele Courtney

more kites you have in the air attracting the public to come and check out the event. AKA section directors can help get kiters of all types to your event. Kiters will go anywhere to fly, as long as most of their expenses are covered.

The park district is lucky to have a half dozen or so hotels that have general managers that are as warm as the Santa Ana winds. With just a few phone calls, I was able to secure more than 35 complimentary hotel rooms for event guests. Food for the kite fliers—two dinners and two lunches—was even easier to get donated. Restaurant names were announced during meals and added to the festival brochure and t-shirts.

A Web presence

An informative Web site is an important tool for promoting a kite festival. For four months prior to the event, we featured online festival activities, competitions and talent. It was a way, too, to get information out to your competitors such as registration forms, directions and compulsory figures, plus advertise sponsor donation packages. And, there are many informative sites that you can link to, such as your kite teams, the AKA Web site and links to other festivals.

Benjamin Franklin experimented with kites to investigate atmospheric electricity/and kite studies were also made by the American physicist and inventor Alexander Graham Bell. - Kites and Kite Flying, http://www.geocities.com /Colosseum/4569/main.html

Building on previous years

Like anything, a kite festival grows and improves with each year. The first year more than 5,500 visitors attended the two-day event. We had a great first showing and pleased many kite enthusiasts with what our property had to offer: large, open fields void of trees, power lines and soccer nets. The public had never seen anything like it.

The second year was an even bigger success, with four kite teams participating (the Chicago Fire Kite Team, Kiteman Productions, the Windjammers and Guildworks), and twice as many individual kiters competing as the year before. We thought of new ways to make money such as charging $4 for parking for the Night Fly event. We also sold food, kite pins, festival t-shirts, glow necklaces and held a kite-making workshop. Each competitor paid $35 to compete.

Producing the Perry Farm Kite Festival has been a very rewarding experience for me. I have met some fantastic people; saw some incredible kite demonstrations and now I have finally decided to catch some wind of my own. I purchased my very first dual line sport kite. And, knowing that the area has terrific kite enthusiasts, I started the P.F.Fliers (Perry Farm Fliers) a local kite club.

So, come visit our 2003 kite festival April 26 and 27 and, remember, you meet the nicest people at the end of the line. Good winds and go for it.

Michele Courtney was a program manager for the Bourbonnais Township Park District and is currently teaching at-risk kids at an alternative school in Lansing, Illinois.

Photographs of the Perry Farm Kite Festival by Michele Courtney.

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