Intended audiences
Primary. Residents of each park’s surrounding community area, with particular attention to people who already use the park — the walkers, the swimmers, the families who claim the same patch of grass every summer — and the drummers who kept time there until their circle was displaced in 2025. These are the people the film is about, and the people the open mic exists for.
Secondary. Chicago’s Caribbean and African Diaspora communities citywide; local artists, poets and musicians in each community area, recruited as participants rather than audience; and film audiences drawn by the premiere.
Anchor partners
At 63rd Street Beach the natural anchor is the Jackson Park Advisory Council, which covers this beach. Ras Tafari Inc. is a member, and discussions with the council are under way. The North and Central anchors are confirmed after park assignment, and outreach begins the week assignments are made.
| Site | Primary target | Secondary targets |
|---|---|---|
| 63rd Street Beach | Jackson Park Advisory CouncilThe established advisory council of record for 63rd Street Beach. Discussions are active. | South Shore Cultural Center; DuSable Black History Museum and Education Center; Woodlawn and South Shore block clubs; the drummers who gathered at the beach until 2025, invited back |
| Rogers (Phillip) Park | Park advisory council and park supervisor at Rogers (Phillip) Park | West Ridge community organizations; Rogers Park Business Alliance; Howard Area Community Center; Loyola Park arts programming; area churches |
| Humboldt Park | National Museum of Puerto Rican Arts and Culture, located in the park | Puerto Rican Cultural Center; Segundo Ruiz Belvis Cultural Center; Humboldt Park advisory council; local bomba and plena practitioners |
The anchor partner is not a logo on a flyer. It is the organization that tells you which elder to ask to open the day, which block club to bring the sign-up sheet to, and who has been drumming in that park for thirty years. At least one artist or speaker on every companion-edition roster is recruited through that park’s anchor partner.
Engagement plan
Marketing
- Owned channels. Event pages with full logistics for each site; e-blast to the organization’s festival and donor list; organization and MarlonTRC social accounts, tagging the Chicago Park District on Facebook and Chicago Parks on Instagram and X.
- Print. Flyers and posters in each community area — libraries, laundromats, barbershops, restaurants, church bulletins, park field houses. Banner at each site the week prior.
- Paid digital. Geo-targeted to the surrounding community areas, in English and Spanish. Modest, tightly bounded spend.
- Earned. Community press and neighborhood newsletters; Caribbean and Latino media; film press for the premiere.
- Samples on file. Festival flyer and poster sets, event pages, and a series of special-event pages built for prior productions, available with the application.
What past experience brings to this
Bringing a festival back after a thirty-year hiatus meant rebuilding an audience from nothing — tracing a community that had scattered and persuading people to show up for something they had not seen in three decades. That work was done through churches, sound systems, promoters and family networks, not advertising. It is the same work this series requires in three communities the organization does not yet know.
The organization also convenes a coalition of Chicago promoters, sound systems and artists, and maintains a public cultural-preservation archive — a practice directly continuous with the open-mic and archive component here. The 63rd Street Beach council work is the most relevant experience of all: it began with exactly the kind of park-level, resident-by-resident organizing this program asks partners to do.