ComFest is Powered by Community.

As a volunteer-run organization, we’re always welcome to anyone who wants to join in our purpose and mission.  There are lots of ways you can get involved in both the festival and its planning and production. To help you find your ideal volunteering position, it helps to know a bit about how ComFest works.

The Community Festival works with community groups, neighborhood residents, the city, public safety and health officials, law enforcement agencies, and private vendors to create a safe and peaceful event for our entire community. Our goals are to build community bridges, nurture collaboration through safe, peaceful, sustainable practices, initiate opportunities for community involvement and activism, and promote a more unified, tolerant, and equitable community. 

The General Planning Committee (GPC) is the main planning and governing body in the Community Festival, and is open to anyone. Our meeting dates are publicly available here. We use a consensus decision making process for all GPC decisions.

Subcommittees are responsible for different parts of the Festival. These committees include Street Fair, who organize and operate all the vendors at the Festival; Libations, who handle all alcohol sales on site; Operations, who set-up, maintain, and tear-down everything for the Festival, and many more. It’s the volunteers in these committees that organize throughout the year and during the live event.

ComFest’s Beginning:

The first Community Festival in 1972 was organized by a group of newly-founded progressive community organizations: The Columbus Free Press, The Columbus Community Food Co-op, The Open Door Clinic, The Columbus Tenent’s Union, Switchboard, and Rape Crisis Center, to name a few. We became known as ComFest: Party with a Purpose. Many of the organizations from that first ComFest have become important community mainstays.

Over the years, the festival has become popular in and beyond Columbus. Today, the Community Festival is a non-profit organization in and of itself, entertaining and exchanging ideas with people from all 50 states and visitors from other nations.