More than 500 exhibitors will showcase their art, ideas and inventions this week at One Spark. They are hoping to get exposure for their work and maybe a big financial reward on Sunday at the festival’s closing ceremony.
More than 600 people are volunteering this year, donating their time and toil to help make the festival a success. They get an orange T-shirt.
Well, there’s more than that to being a One Spark volunteer.
For some, it’s an opportunity to make new friends and meet potential business associates.
For some, it’s a way to help promote Downtown.
For others, it has become a way to better express their own entrepreneurial spirit.
“I fell in love with it when I saw what it does for people and for Jacksonville,” said Bobbi Mercer, who is marking her second year as a volunteer. “One Spark puts feet on these creators. I feel like I’m making a difference.”
Mercer was working Tuesday morning with Shana Friar, a first-year One Spark volunteer. They were registering attendees at the One Spark Speaker Summit at the Florida Theatre.
A Florida Blue employee, Friar receives volunteer hours with pay and decided to use some of them to help out with the festival.
“I wanted to do it after I heard people talking about volunteering last year,” she said.
While the number of festival volunteers is just about the same as last year, 2015 will go down in One Spark history as the year of corporate participation in the unpaid army of workers, said Meredith O’Malley Johnson, community and public relations director.
More than half of this year’s volunteers work for Bank of America, Deutsche Bank, Florida Blue or Wells Fargo, she said.
“We really made a push to get corporate volunteers. They do everything from photography and videography to customer service to staffing the VIP and lounge areas and working with creators,” Johnson said. “But we don’t ask them to pick up trash.”
Doug Glenn is volunteering for the second year. He works in the loan department at JPMorgan Chase. He enjoys the people who participate in One Spark as exhibitors and as spectators. The week also is valuable for making new business contacts.
“I have the entrepreneurial spirit and I like to foster that in other people,” he said. “And it’s a good opportunity to network.”
Cary Hepler volunteered at the first two festivals and sees the event as a way to promote vibrancy in the urban core. He starts wearing a One Spark sticker on his shirt about a month before the festival and in 2013, ran the Gate River Run carrying a Styrofoam One Spark logo on a stick.
”It’s important to have an awesome Downtown,” said Hepler. “I’m a big Downtown proponent.”
The orange T-shirt brigade will be on duty all six days of the event, working in four coordinated shifts beginning at 7 a.m. each day. Johnson said volunteers in 2014 logged more than 6,000 hours.
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