SPONTANEOUS
CELEBRATIONS
If you haven’t been to the home base for these festivals, please come visit our space. We are just around the corner at 45 Danforth Street and have community potlucks, concerts and dance parties on Fridays throughout much of the year. We have maker space for community arts and encourage groups to contact us for space to make banners, buttons, work on collective projects, rent affordable meeting and teaching spaces for arts and dance, or to find out about the public classes happening in our space!
Balletrox, Sing Positive, New Fusion, JP Jitterbugs, and more all meet and teach out of Spontaneous. In the winter and early spring we organize Wake Up the Earth Festival and in the Fall we organize the Jamaica Pond Lantern Parade. We also have a late summer Solfest and a midwinter Tropical Fiesta. We welcome new volunteers and participants.
Fridays are often a good way to get involved, and we welcome volunteers to contact us about volunteer opportunities. Sign up for our mailing list, so we can tell you when things are happening!
Anker Power for the Win!
We are now powering our stages with batteries that are being charged from our solar energy! We rent these out to other groups organizing events. Especially those using SouthWest Corridor park, Franklin Park, Pinebank Promontory, or other local areas without power sources. If your group is interested in renting these “generator” systems please reach out to us. The cost will cover an equipment and labor fee, as one of our team will come with them, they are generally lower cost than a generator, quieter than a generator and more easily permitted than a generator!
Wake Up the Earth Festival - The Movement that Stopped a Highway
As you are here today, we invite you to help us think about all the ways we have migrated around the world. How migration is central to the human experience and the experience of all natural things. Join us in celebrating what this festival is founded on. How a diverse community, from many backgrounds and many races, joined together over many years to fight the separation of our community by a six lane highway. Together we WON and stopped a 6 lane highway extension from coming right through this very park you are standing in.
That’s right my friends, The Stop the Highway Movement WON. This may be one of the most profound local activism success stories you will hear about. One that won in the 11th hour, after years of organizing, protesting, lobbying and working to stop a highway that would have impacted our community in a very major way. The project had already begun to impact our community through demolition, easements and eminent domain.
The message of this festival is that the heart is meant to move. We are meant to migrate, change, grow. It is a coming together of our community, across race, gender, class, age, faith, and all identity markers. We gather together to parade through our community. We invite many dozens of nonprofits to table or create a project to share. We look for partners like Wasted, Inside Out, Everyday People, Extinction Rebellion, Bikes not Bombs, Break the Chains, MetaMovements, to highlight our commitment to Climate Justice, Diversity, Cultural Representation.
We are going through a very challenging time in this country. One that is challenging our migrant community, our queer community, our neighbors. We need to work together to protect the heart of our world. When we are working hard for change, through protests, lobbies, phone calls and postcards, voting and meeting and petitioning, sometimes it is so hard to believe that we can succeed.
And so this year we invite you to Believe with us. Know that we live in a city and a community that is working for that. We invite you to go back in time and read about the Stop the Highway Movement. And then to go forward and look at who we are today. All the ways in which we are partnering for climate justice. All the ways we are living our visions.
Come by the Spontaneous booth near junk percussion and get to know the people of Spontaneous Celebrations - the Community Cultural art center that organizes and hosts these festivals.
Add a piece of your heart to the wall in the front field. something you are committed to working for and protecting. We are united together in this work for a better world. The Heart is Made to Move.