The reviews are in and undoubtedly, the 2023 edition of the Louisiana Legends Festival was a huge success with an estimated 5,000 people attending over an eight-hour period. The festival provided a great time for all with lots to see and do including music, arts, crafts, food, car show, farmers market, and we honored Claiborne Parish’s Legendary Coach Red Franklin.

Putting on a festival like this requires a lot of hard work and countless hours of volunteer time. It’s hard to calculate the return on investment (ROI) that hosting a festival or event provides. Or is it? We are always interested in the economic opportunity provided by events such as these and how to capture quantifiable data indicating the ROI to our parish. We were able to do this with our charity food vendors.

Festival goers enjoyed the variety of great food provided by this year’s twenty charity food vendors. Stipulations for food vendors at the Louisiana Legends Festival is that they: 1) represent a Claiborne Parish nonprofit organization, school, church, or other charity organization. 2) sell only one unique item that is not duplicated by another vendor. 3) have a maximum price of $5 per serving. So how much money did they make?

At the time of this writing and with some vendors not reporting yet, the total influx of money for Claiborne
Parish’s charities is over $15,000. This arrangement provides our local charities the opportunity to make as much or more money in one day than they can all year by other fundraising methods. This money will help their organizations function and serve our community and a lot of that money came from outside the parish. Who says tourism isn’t economic development? Tourism is quantifiable economic development!

Jimmy Hand – Main Street Homer