Frequently Asked Questions

About the Festival

What’s the Role of Youth?   Youth are both volunteers for, and sponsors of, the October 10 community event, along with other sponsors and supporters. They provide advice, technical assistance, muscle, and support.

Who Comes?  The event draws people of all backgrounds.  It includes the older and younger, the urban and suburban, the straight and gay, business executives and retail clerks, faith people of any or no denomination, clergy, educators, social service professionals, public officials, and community activists. 

Records show that 60 percent of participants come from around Oak Park, and 40 percent come from city neighborhoods and further-out suburbs.  The core theme is All In This Together.  A moveable potluck feast held on a Sunday afternoon, this year October 10.  The event is a celebration of foods and culture.  Since the founding in 1995 the event has attracted a combined total of 3,500 potluck participants and celebrants—made up of guests,  attendees, volunteers, sponsors, and/or financial supporters.

What Happens?  Participants share their prepared-at-home foods, ranging from the simple homespun to the downright elegant. They also donate their artistic talents.  There to enjoy also is a generous sampling of art displays from local artists who attend to casually talk up their art. 

There to enjoy as well is live entertainment from music bands on a stage, performance sets by solo singers, dancers, and poets and, last, recorded amplified music during breaks.

The ticket to admission is bringing one of your  favorite potluck dishes (cold or hot) for eight or more.  One dish per family.  There is no admission fee.

What Is the Event’s Physical Arrangement at the Site?  The most important practical physical requirement at the site itself is that all potluck foods brought by attendees will be in the lobby of Oak Park Public Library.  Beverages will be on the plaza. In contiguous Scoville Park and on the library plaza are the sit-down tables.  Celebrants meet, mix, and eat.  The restrooms are completely and ADA accessible.  

Volunteers for set-up and other preparations, taking about two hours maximum, will have access to the inside as early as 10 a.m. There is basic oversight of the volunteers, helping and guiding and facilitating, all so that things go smoothly during the gathering, during setup and  take down, and during the feast itself.  Gathering begins at 1. 

Main foods are served promptly at 2, and desserts at 3.  Live entertainment begins around 2:15, and the day ends by 5. Clean-up takes about one hour.

What’s the Point of It All?  Hundreds of prepared family potluck dishes take unique shape as a communion of foods.  The experience is transformed into an experience of people from all walks of life, all callings, participating directly through their potluck dishes and other ways in creating a demonstration of cultural pluralism and diversity at its tastiest and most spontaneous.

For further information on this event as a signature project of Resources Unlimited Foundation, please see Beyond Eating: Ways to Enjoy the Festival of Potluck Foods, an essay written in 2002 by event co-founders Jim Boushay and Rickey Sain Sr., who also serve with others as hosts along with other hosts and co-hosts.   

Who Gets Invited?  Invitations go to past and future participants who, in turn, are asked to honor the event’s spirit of inclusion and neighborliness by inviting others. Sponsors, vendors/suppliers, donors also receive invitations to attend and/or to contribute at various levels of support.  Pre- and post-event research by the Foundation shows that word-of-mouth and press coverage draw many participants.

Where Does the Financial Support Come From?  At last year's feast in 2003, festival financial and pro-bono support came from three sources:  individuals, community organizations, and local businesses.

What Do the Volunteers Do?  The enterprise draws a growing number of individuals and organizations providing volunteer assistance.  Foundation staff establishes a volunteer steering committee that, in turn, establishes other committees typical of big celebrations.  Committees do the planning and facilitate event activities. 

Volunteers provide the muscle.  They do the work of identifying music groups and performers and artists, and the writing and placing of news and feature stories and free notices in newspapers and newsletters of faith-based, social justice, and other community-based groups. Volunteers set out the tables and chairs donated for the day by area churches.

Other volunteers, in the manner of preparing for a big family dinner at home, put on the tablecloths, decorate the tables, and set out 700 ceramic dishes, cloth napkins, and stainless steel flatware and serving utensils to go with the many potluck dishes.

On-the-spot volunteers assist with set-up and takedown and help with hospitality before and during. About 120 attendees were at the first homespun version in 1995.  In the more mature 2002 version, attendees numbered between 400-450, and in 2003 across a rainy afternoon there were about 150-200.

How is the Event Promoted?  Additional attendance comes from print and broadcast materials drafted by younger and older volunteers, who handle most of the public information functions mindful of current events.

They promote the festival potluck as a private-public experience of peace through civic engagement, carried out locally as a collective act of goodwill in a conflicted world, a world of wretched suffering and groaning amid the harsh growing pains of global interdependence. 

What is an ‘Atmosphere of Simple Elegance and Goodwill’?  In simple yet profoundly hopeful contrast, the Sunday afternoon happening—of faces and fun and food aplenty—is transformed into an outdoor in-the-moment community at perhaps its most spontaneous and freshest. 

Somehow the spirit of play in community interaction also manages simultaneously to value a more serious sense of the social and spiritual complexity that is embodied in sharing a meal.  The invitation has called it an experience of “sharing our foods in an atmosphere of simple elegance and goodwill.” 

From time to time participants and others have called it something of an archetype of the breaking of the bread.  The Foundation works with community organizations elsewhere to replicate the event or related off-shoot events in their own neighborhoods and home communities.

How Does Greater Community Involvement Happen?  Over the course of eight separate potlucks since 1995, the patterns of community discussion about—and loyalty to—the idea of the potluck festival has increased the capacity of Foundation programs to encourage and facilitate more people getting involved in their communities and neighborhoods. 

In a special sense, the feast has become a Foundation signature project, given its call to citizens old and young and in between to a greater sense of how to make things better through different expressions of community involvement.

What About Clean Up and Attention to Detail?  Festival volunteers have always honored the previous sites (Anderson Center, Garfield Terrace Apartments, Pleasant Home at Mills Park, Oak Park Conservatory, Stevenson Center & Park, etc.).  It is with care always that they have set up and taken down.  They have left each site in the condition in which it was found.  There have been few complaints.  Remarks mostly have been mostly complimentary about the attention paid to detail and take-down.

Where Do I Get More Information? 

To RSVP with an offer to help with a few basic housekeeping routines, or for further information, call 708-524-8387 or send an email to

Info@ResourcesUnlimited.org

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