Happy New Year and welcome to the CBA’s 42nd year. We kick off with multiple concerts and the Great 48 in Bakersfield this month. Early Bird Tickets are available for our Father’s Day Bluegrass Festival and we have a brand new and updated festival-specific website at www.fathersdayfestival.com for you to check out. 2017 promises to be another big year with multiple activities and opportunities for you all.
Our membership numbers continue to decrease and we invite all of you who now download your Bluegrass Breakdown for free from our new website to think seriously about joining/renewing your CBA membership. Memberships are inexpensive and we want you back. Individual memberships are $25/ per year and couples are $30/year. For those of you who have children who are now adults, now is the time to treat them to their own memberships. We are an all volunteer, membership driven organization and membership numbers and dues are extremely important to us. It is easy to renew/join on line at http://www.cbaweb.org/Members/SignUp Thank you.
The CBA Youth Program is the program we hope you will all get behind. We are expanding our activities from primarily festival-based to year round. Our annual scholarship funding drive is woefully short of our goal of $6000 and has not even hit the half way mark. Please consider making a tax deductible donation to the CBA Youth Program. OnLine donations can be made on the website. Click here and donate: http://www.cbaweb.org/Learning/Donate Checks made out to CBA Youth Program may be sent to Darby Brandli, 2106 9th Avenue, Oakland 94606. We are grateful to those who have already donated. Tax letters will be sent to all who donate $25 and more. There are no administrative costs (except advertising and postage) and all funds go directly to our deserving youth. Please be generous and donate a lot or a little, our bluegrass future depends on it.
The new process for application/selection of young musicians to go to the International Bluegrass Music Association’s World of Bluegrass Kids on Bluegrass program is live January 1 through January 31. (See the article in this issue). There is a LINK to the googledoc for application posted throughout the month on the website. For more information you may contact us at cbayouthprogram@gmail.com. Only four deserving young musicians will be selected. Your scholarship donations help with the travel expense.
We are updating our Kids Instrument Lending Library data base and we are tracking down instruments lent to people who have let their memberships lapse, to those whose children are now 18 and to those we have lost touch with. Please help us by arranging to return instruments so that another generation can benefit. Randy January is the Lending Librarian who is digitizing our data base (big job) and we look forward to hearing from you. Our email address is kidslendinglibrary@gmail.com. We will send out letters to many of you
We are excited to announce two new kid jams: one in Berkeley and one in Sacramento. We will be starting up a monthly Sunday kid jam at the Freight & Salvage in Berkeley (accessible by BART). The initial dates scheduled are February 26th, March 26th and April 16th from noon to 3. For information and RSVP contact us at cbayouthprogram@gmail.com. The Sacramento area jam will be on Monday evenings at a private home in Lincoln, CA. The first jam will be Monday, February 6th at 6P. Contact Deanna Kerr at neverblocked@gmail.com for information and to be put on a mailing list.
The 5th Annual CBA Youth Academy registration process will open February 15th on the website. We only enroll 49 children ages 8-16 for this always sold out event. The tuition will remain at $300 for the 4 day event, Wednesday through Saturday during the Father’s Day Festival on the Nevada County Fairgrounds. We hope to have $100 scholarships available. Our faculty band this year is the BAREFOOT MOVEMENT and they will also appear for a show Thursday evening on the Pioneer Stage.
Get out your checkbooks and renew/join the CBA and donate to the CBA Youth Program. We can only thrive with your financial support and willingness to volunteer for our organization. We serve you.
