By Emily Randall
Northeast News
Feb. 10, 2010

The Northeast Chamber of Commerce has birthed a new sub-organization out of the former Historic Northeast Fall Festival nonprofit.

Historic Northeast Events is a chamber 501(c)3 intended, like Fall Festival, to bring funding to events in the neighborhood. However, unlike Fall Festival, the focus won’t be on one massive, annual event. It will be on several small, business community-focused events.

“That gives us an opportunity to do a little more for the community,” Chamber Board President Bobbi Baker-Hughes said.

The last fall festival was two years ago. The event, which was attracting 15,000 people in the end, had a 13-year run at The Concourse park. It grew so big that the Fall Festival Committee decided it needed to turn its focus to smaller, more neighborhood-based events.

“I think Historic Northeast Events is going to make that happen,” Baker-Hughes said.

She said initially, the plan is to sponsor three events in a year — an international business crawl like the one the chamber sponsored this past fall, a Taste of Northeast restaurant tour and a third which is still on the drawing table.

The third event, Baker-Hughes said, may eventually be a fun, outdoor event involving youth like the Fall Festival was.

“But definitely because [Historic Northeast Events] is an arm of the chamber, we want to give all the businesses an opportunity to get out there and take a test drive,” she said.

She means test drive literally, as helping the new nonprofit facilitate these events is the chamber’s recent acquisition of a shuttle bus from an anonymous donor.

“I can see it could help the community with homes tours, art tours, things like that,” Chamber Executive Director Rebecca Koop said. “If we show off the best of Northeast, like our restaurants and parks, it might convince some people to not just visit, but buy homes, start a business here.”

In addition to various themed tours of Northeast, which could bring economic development into the neighborhood, Koop said she could see using the bus to take Northeast business owners on tours outside of Northeast as an educational chamber event to see how other business nodes operate.

Historic Northeast Events will kick off with its first event, a fundraiser called Beads, Beans and Beers FUNraiser, from 6-10 p.m. this coming Tuesday at Askew Inn, 3600 Independence Ave. The Mardi Gras-themed event is meant to garner a bit of seed money to get Historic Northeast Events rolling.