The Woodside Parent-Teacher Student Association (PTSA) hosted The Harvest Fest on November 15th for the first time in over a decade.
The Harvest Fair is a Makers Market where local vendors and student groups can set up a booth and sell their homemade items. The majority of the vendors were from the San Mateo County area, so they were all relatively local.
“I was involved in the Woodside High School (WHS) Harvest Fest 10 years ago,” community representative on the PTSA Karen Seiko Arimoto-Peterson said. “I wanted to bring this event back, so I brought it up last year at a PTSA meeting and asked three of my friends to be on the committee with me, then we were approved, and we started up in August of this school year.”
The vendors for this event were sourced from other community members who helped organize similar events.
“We had a really great group of vendors, including high-quality fine artists who were pretty much local,” PTSA president Lisha Mainza said. “We have contacts with some other folks who have had this type of event before, and we contacted their vendors to participate in our event.”
Along with the parents and community members who contributed, students from Woodside also made items.
“I definitely wanted to include the student groups like ceramics [who sold homemade pottery], robotics, drama boosters, and athletic boosters,” Mainza said. “The Baking For Charity club and Culinary class were too busy, so they weren’t able to get involved.”
In most flea markets or maker’s markets, vendors have to pay for the spot they occupy to sell their items.
“If it was a school-related group, they didn’t have to pay the vendor fee,” Peterson said. “WHS students independently signed up, as well as the other vendors. Concessions were run through the PTSA. We had the support of the admin and Karen van Putten to promote the event.”
An event like this requires a lot of planning and time to ensure it goes as smoothly as possible, such as setting deadlines, finding vendors, planning the layout of the market and figuring out what materials need to be rented or gathered.
“We started off small because you don’t want too many cooks in the kitchen at the very beginning,” Mainza said. “So there was just a solid group of four. We met on Zoom once a week and organized our activities through that platform. We had a list of things to do until our next meeting, and we just pushed forward.”
With this set planning schedule starting in August and going to November, several factors needed to be considered when setting up the event.
“[The setup consisted of] getting the right date, procuring a venue, gathering lists of prospective vendors, laying out the schematic vision of vendors, concessions, drawing table donations, marketing, and getting 40 tables,” Peterson said.
In this event, there were around 35 vendors and 350 customers in attendance.
“[To get involved with the event] the vendor fills out the application and I read over the answers,” Peterson said. “I look at the products featured, and if I have too much merchandise of the same type, I will turn them away. There are too many soap/candle products, as well as jewelry. Additionally, there is a deadline for submitting applications.”
The PTSA utilizes several social media platforms, including Facebook and Instagram, to advertise events such as the Harvest Fest.
“We really tried to reach out into our communities for the advertising listed on social media,” Mainza said. “We posted quite a bit, as well as tagged some others, like the athletic boosters.”
One aspiration Peterson had for the future of the event was to increase its size and the level of planning required.
“[One thing we would probably do differently is] giving student clubs some warning so they can work on their merchandise,” Peterson said. “I also want to include more cultural groups, increase vendors to 40-45 in numbers, and include a jazz band on site.”
There were numerous items for sale during the event, all of which were homemade or handcrafted.
“There were chili cheese dogs, boba from the Corner Table, Julie B’s fine jewelry, coastal dawn, candles, succulent plants, spices from nutmeg, tie-dye shirts, lots of holiday crafts, lavender and much more,” Mainza said.
Peterson and Mainza describe the event as a success and hope to make it an annual tradition, currently pending approval from the PTSA.
“The stronger your community, the happier people are going to be,” Mainza said. “The better students are gonna do. It’s great team building, and connecting is very important.”
