Following months of planning and two rainouts, 1,500 people gather at the Grand Baldwin Festival

One of the purposes with the coalition is to bring people together.”

Claudia Rotondo co-chair, Community Coalition of Baldwin

The Community Coalition of Baldwin worked around the clock to bring Baldwin’s biggest festival back after it was postponed last October.

Claudia Rotondo, the coalition’s founder and co-chair, shrugged off the ill-timed rainout in the fall — and another one last month — and made clear that the Grand Baldwin Festival still succeeded in bringing the community together on May 21.

The idea for the festival dates back to 2011. Rotondo, the director of the Baldwin Council Against Drug Abuse, a drug-prevention and awareness agency focused on teaching students about substance abuse, wanted to join a communitywide group, but there was none like what she was looking for in Baldwin at the time. So she sent out invitations to churches, fraternal organizations, PTAs — even groups of medical professions — and invited them to help her create a coalition that would have greater impact in Baldwin, and strengthen residents’ pride in the hamlet.

“One of the purposes with the coalition is to bring people together, so that people have a sense of belonging,” Rotondo said, “and that’s how the coalition got born.”

As the director of the Council Against Drug Abuse, she wanted the new organization to help prevent community members from turning to substance abuse. She hoped that people could turn to other people for comfort instead of drugs.

“At a coalition meeting,” she recalled, co-chair “David Viana said, ‘Let’s highlight the community and let’s bring the community together. David and I had ideas that just meshed, and this was how the festival was born.” It was Viana’s idea, she emphasized.

The festival made its debut in 2019, behind the Baldwin Public Library, in conjunction with the library’s 50th anniversary celebration.

“They had somebody at the door, clocking people in, and about 3,000 people were in the library,” Rotondo recounted. “And I’m assuming that more people showed up to the festival throughout the day.”

The event was canceled in 2020, amid the pandemic, and didn’t return until the fall of 2021. The plan was to bring it back at the beginning of October 2022, but it was rained out. “The remnants of Hurricane Ian drenched the entire weekend,” Rotondo said.

At that point, she explained, she couldn’t find an indoor venue that would fit all of the originally planned 100 vendors — Baldwin High School had strict insurance policies, and couldn’t be used — so coalition members decided to reschedule the event in April.

“People would ask, ‘Why don’t you just reschedule this event for next week?’” Rotondo said. “Just because it’s called a ‘pop-up’ doesn’t mean it pops up. There’s a lot of planning that goes on, and a lot of red tape.” Not to mention months of Zoom calls among coalition members.

The festival was scheduled for April 29, but it was washed out again. Rotondo and her colleagues tried to find an indoor venue for the following day, but couldn’t in time. The weather failed to cooperate yet again on May 20, but the next day — this time a planned rain date — the skies cleared, and hundreds crowded the municipal parking lot behind the library.

There were a few more headaches that morning, not quite constituting a rain delay. The storms the day before left large puddles, and it took some energetic volunteers to make them disappear before the vendors started showing up.

“My son got a team together with big brooms, and starting in the middle of the parking lot, they pushed the water out of the area,” Rotondo said. “It looked like a dance routine.”

As if that wasn’t enough, there were seven cars in the lot that had been parked there illegally overnight.

Rotondo and her team worked with local police to get them moved before the vendors began arriving.

There were a total of 75 vendors — down from the original count of 107, due to the challenges of rescheduling — but over the course of the day, an estimated 1,500 to 2,000 people attended.

Some of the festival’s proceeds will fund three $500 scholarships for graduating Baldwin High School seniors who have been active community service. The coalition will use the remainder of the money to fund other community events.

Despite all the obstacles, Rotondo was glad that the festival finally took place, and said she “had a lot of fun.”