Our Shrinking World
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The truth is that the festival has always had to scramble for money, except in its inaugural year, when it was fully funded by the Mayor’s Office of Special Events. “We wanted to help them showcase what a full World Music Festival could feel like so they could get sponsors interested,” says special events executive director Jim Law. “What would have had to happen after that was relationships would have started forming with different members of the corporate community.” While Law says Orlove has succeeded in getting some regular sponsorship, he suggests that developing a self-sustaining ten-day festival can take a while. “We made a commitment to do the first-year launch, and we couldn’t guarantee after that that we could pick it up.”
The Office of Special Events, whose budget comes entirely from corporate sponsorship and Taste of Chicago revenue, presents all of the major music festivals held each summer in Grant Park, including the blues, jazz, gospel, Latin, and Celtic festivals, as well as the Taste. Each of these offers sponsors the chance to advertise to hundreds of thousands of people in a single place in just a few days; that’s something the WMF, spread out over many smaller sites–which work better for its often lesser-known artists, as well as its goals of reaching ethnic communities and encouraging cooperation between local presenters of world music–can’t match. “We couldn’t automatically transfer interest among existing sponsors,” says Law. “That’s not to say there weren’t other sponsors interested in this intimate situation, but those were not the ones we were as familiar with.”
“I don’t think we’ve ever been in a position a month after the festival ends to say [next year] we’re definitely bringing in this group from Brazil or this group from Algeria, because there’s always a question if we’re going to have flight sponsorship or money to actually work with,” says Orlove. “That makes a big difference when you’re planning a festival.”
