Britt Music & Arts Festival is lucky to have many amazing people and organizations that show support year after year. One particular partnership this year has proven to be especially helpful. This spring, Rogue Valley Manor partnered with Britt and offered their landscape crew’s services to help get the hill summer ready for the 2024 season!

Britt depends on the support of local businesses through its Business Partner program, where businesses and individuals sponsor events at Britt in return for special benefits. “Each Business Partner offers something special to Britt and sometimes, we’re able to come up with creative ways that we can work together; ways in which our Business Partners can utilize and share their skills and strengths that can be especially useful to us,” said Abby McKee, President & CEO of Britt Music & Arts Festival. And in May of this year, Rogue Valley Manor made the suggestion to have their grounds crew come out and help Britt pre-season to clean up the hill.

“We thought it would be a great opportunity for us to pair up with Britt because so many of our residents come over here and are members of the Britt Society and come to all the concerts, so we really thought it would be a great partnership,” said Dave Keaton, Executive Director of Rogue Valley Manor. “We’ve got 658 acres of land to take care of and we’ve got a huge maintenance and landscape crew. So we thought, ‘what better way to help Britt than to bring over the whole crew and give kind of a pre-season cleanup?’”

Rogue Valley Manor not only brought its landscape team to the hill, but many of the department directors as well. The team pulled weeds, trimmed hedges, disposed of yard waste, and so much more during the two-day clean-up event!

“Partnerships like this have the ability to be so innovative,” said Britt President & CEO, Abby McKee. “We don’t think regularly about something like Rogue Valley Manor as being able to come help us beautify the hill, but I think through creative thinking with our partners, we’re able to come up with some of these really great projects that to really put our strengths together and make this an incredible place for people to be. And I think this is such a key indicator of local pride in the venue as well, that this space belongs to everyone and we love having people here helping us steward it.”

For Dave Keaton, this partnership was a way of solidifying their organization as part of the local community.

“We’re trying to let the Valley know that by doing events like this and being out and about, that we are an open campus,” Keaton said. “You know, we’ve got a thousand residents up there, they’re part of Medford and the Rogue Valley, so we want that integration to continue and this is a great way to do that.”