When the gates open this weekend for the 2023 edition of the Vancouver Folk Music Festival (VFMF), that day should be an extra-emotional one, Anne Blaine tells the Straight.

“I haven’t given that part a lot of thought, but I cry for nothing, so I’m sure it will be,” says Blaine, whose involvement with the VFMF goes all the way back to the early ’80s. “I cry for TV ads, so what can I say?”

Seven months ago, just a couple of weeks into the new year, the long-running institution made an announcement that shocked the West Coast: “It is with great sadness that we announce that the 2023 Vancouver Folk Music Festival has been cancelled, as the VFMF Society simply does not have the resources to produce an event this year.”

Flash forward to the summer, and, through an effort that might be best described as Herculean, the Vancouver Folk Festival will celebrate its 46th year in Jericho Beach Park from July 14 to 16.

Blaine is one of the new Folk Fest board members who’ve helped make this year happen. Having experience helped—an events industry veteran, she previously served as a VFMF staff member from 1980 to 1993, and then later joined the board from 2011 to 2017.

Citing rising costs for everything from attracting talent to the day-to-day operations of running a major event, the previous board announced the dissolution of the festival on January 17. An annual general meeting followed, with Blaine among those who stepped forward to pull the VFMF out of the fire.

“The fact that so many people who’ve been so involved and cared about it hadn’t even heard a whisper that this [the call for the dissolution] was coming down the pike was one of the big shockers,” she says. “As far as we could tell, no serious outreach for help or assistance or real advice had been made.”

Noting that she understands raising money for events like the Folk Fest can be hard, she continues, “To me, if it really needed to take a pause, you take a pause. But you don’t dissolve 45 years of history, lose your charity number, lose all your connections, and lose all your good will. That makes no sense to me.”

So, after stepping up at the AGM, Blaine and her fellow newly elected board members immediately committed to making a 2023 edition of the fest work. That became a lot easier after March, when the provinical government announced a $30 million fund to provide one-time grants of up to $250,000 for festivals and fairs. Also helping was the offer of support and booking advice from other festivals, as well as key contractors (including food and beverage and volunteer coordinators) for the Folk Fest agreeing to come back.

“We’re really thrilled to have not disappeared,” Blaine says. “The board, in addition to working in operations and admin and backfilling a lot of those roles, is also really working hard towards a future for this festival, trying to backstop it with a much more solid financial foundation. We’re not there yet—we’ve only been on the board as it is now since March. And a lot of attention went to pulling the festival together. But we’ve also had a retreat where we’ve started planning for the future. Everyone is focussed and committed.”

She adds, “We’re working hard with the Musqueam group, with the city, with the parks board to maybe make the odd tweak that can help us survive more easily in the future. So we’ll see where things go. The future is in a couple of weeks, and then there’s the long-term future where we try and build it for the next 45 and 46 years. There are always solutions—no problem is that huge.”

As much work as it’s all been, Blaine says there are reasons it’s been worth it: the Vancouver Folk Music Festival isn’t a Vancouver institution by accident.

“Hundreds of thousands of ticket buyers and volunteers have been through the gates over the past 45 years, and hung out on that site,” she says. “People say it’s a life-changing weekend. I was going to be a teacher—I was working on my degree when I first got involved in 1978. I finished the degree but I never pursued the job because I got so involved with the festival. It completely changed the trajectory of my life, and I know many others.”