One Spark

[existentialpoet]

RIP to the festival we all loved and hoped would be the event to push our city onto the national cultural map.

https://theexistentialpoet.com/category/blog/

[TheCat]

Great write up. Thanks for sharing.

[beach breh]

Either you drank the Elton Rivas marketing gimmick Kool Aid, or you never really opened your eyes.  Sure, it was the "World's Largest Crowd Funding Festival". They just as easily could have called it the "World's ONLY Crowdfunding Festival."  The idea, as proposed (which the actual event did not even live up to), is not sustainable.  It was all smoke and mirrors-- you cannot attract quality, amazing innovation to a "festival" for so many reasons (idea theft, paucity of funds to winners, etc.).  Those who didnt get caught up on the rah-rah spirit and actually did the tiniest bit of critical thinking saw that from the beginning.

"The name is the same but this is not the festival we had hoped would become the underlining national cultural event for Jacksonville... The One Spark concept has been left to the wayside and the name has been stolen for personal gain."

To think that One Spark would become a national cultural event is truly some pie-in-the-sky make believe.  And, in fact, the prior incarnation was all about the personal gain of Elton and a few others.  In contrast, very hard working individuals at DVI and other organizations (whose names you'll never know) busted their asses this year for the complete opposite reason of personal gain: because they love downtown, and are working hard for it all the time, not just when a bunch of tourists come down for a glorified street fair gussied up under the buzzwords and over-promises of the awful entrepreneurial culture.

preach!!! One Spark as a crowdfunding venture was a complete sham - i'm surprised the charade lasted as long as it did.

One Spark as a street festival was fun. It was a celebration of innovation IN JACKSONVILLE. Local brews. Local Foods. Local Peeps. Local Creatives. Make it a huge street festival. Celebrate the culture of our city. Dump the voting, dump the business peddling nonsense, dump the guise of a crowdfunding festival. Spark a business by celebrating businesses. Jacksonville is too big. Bring it together in a festival.

[fliving]

Maybe some people from here need to go and talk to the people at whatever OneSpark is now about building up their relationship with Chamber of Commerce and DVI and evolving into a big street festival focused on local businesses or something else that would work.

[I-10east]

I went on Thursday (the last day; morn/early afternoon) and it was uneventful as hell, basically a regular day. The only thing that reminded me of One Spark was there was the trademark large '1s' with the spark atop. There was only two food trucks, Latin cuisine, and coffee. I was expecting to go to Island Noodles, but they obviously was nowhere in sight. What a letdown, from the Landing to Hemming Park; This supposed 'festival' which I remember fun times from was dead as hell. Really sad. 

[jaxlore]

Good article. There definitely seemed to be a lot of people on Wednesday at least but yeah it really didn't have the previous one spark vibe at all.