JMUbilee, round two

by Carrie Muhleman, contributing writer

Plans for the second JMUbilee, a carnival intended for community members and students to mingle, are currently underway to make the event bigger and better this spring.

JMUbilee is a festival-like event created to bring the Harrisonburg community and the JMU campus closer together. Tom Culligan (’05), former student body president and co-founder of JMUbilee, said it is a way to introduce dialogue and understanding between students and community members.

“JMUbilee seeks to bring everyone together to an on-campus, family-friendly festival for a day of collaboration, celebration and fun,” Culligan said. “We want to make this event an opportunity for campus and community organizations to learn about each other. We also really want to welcome the Harrisonburg community to the JMU campus, as they often don’t feel welcome here, and give something back to the community that hosts JMU.”

Culligan and Corey Schwartz, the current chief event coordinator, founded JMUbilee last year with the hope of creating a unifying and fun JMU convention.

“I want this event to become a tradition at JMU, as well as become a possible club or organization a couple years down the road,” Schwartz said.

While an event of this scale usually requires a full year of preparation, the core planning for JMUbilee last year took place in approximately five weeks. Nevertheless, it proved to be a success, hosting about 25 groups of diverse student and community organizations.

“We got a late start last year, had very little time to plan and absolutely no budget,” Drew Richard, vice president of event coordination, said. “We were working completely off of donations, so it was impressive to see a group of about a dozen people pull off an event that large in little over a month.”