Volunteer Policy Shift

As you probably know by my incessant whining about it here, we have a hard time every year rounding up enough volunteers to work Irish Fest. It takes more than a thousand and it's a struggle to fill all the spots. We get it, really. Free time is scarce and with money and budgets tight, volunteer work just doesn't always make sense in this day and age. So today we announce a major change in the way we do business at the Kansas City Irish Fest. Beginning this year all the people who who sign up to work our former volunteer positions, be they kids' area workers, t-shirt sellers, raffle ticket pushers or ticket takers, will be paid the Missouri minimum wage of $7.25 an hour. They will also receive comprehensive health and dental coverage and workers with 5 or more years of service will be enrolled in a generous retirement plan. We're confident that this new policy will for good and all end our staffing struggles.

Obviously in order to afford such largesse, cuts will have to be made elsewhere. So this year–and this should be exciting–we'll be presenting an all volunteer entertainment line up. We don't really have that many acts lined up yet since we've really just finalized the new policy. I can tell you that Gaelic Storm's Patrick Murphy will be doing an acoustic solo show called "Accent On Accordion." And we have this awesome fiddle player we found outside Kelly's bar on St. Patrick's Day:

We're working on other stuff and I'm pretty sure it'll all work out in the end. At any rate, we finally have our volunteer woes settled...so there's that.