Planning well underway for 41st Blueberry Festival

Tim Brody - Editor

Sioux Lookout’s 41st Blueberry Festival is slated for August 4-13 and deadlines for sponsorship and event registration are this week.
The future of the long-running festival was in doubt last fall when the majority of the festival’s board members announced they planned to step down from the festival’s organizing committee.
A call was put out for new board members and a new committee has been established. 
Event and sponsorship packages were sent out earlier this spring.
The deadline to register events or become a sponsor for this year’s festival is June 23.
People can find out more and get event and sponsorship forms by emailing festival@blueberrybert.com.
The deadline to order t-shirts for this year’s festival is July 7.
This year’s Blueberry Festival Committee will include Alanna Pizziol-Carroll, Shannon Brody, Reece Van Breda, Laine Helbling, Mike Redcliffe, Angie Bernard, Nancy McCord, Christine Reid, and returning committee members Charron Sippola and Melissa Ayotte.
“We have a really great team. I’m really excited about the group of people that have come together to work on this, this year,” Helbling shared.
Helbling, a graphic designer, created this year’s logo. “I wanted to design something really fun that would appeal to a wide audience, so I came up with this kind of stacked composition with Blueberry Bert poking his head over one side and Sioux Mountain on the other side and some really bright and vibrant colours.”
The Blueberry Festival Committee also recently hired a Festival Coordinator, Colby Defoort.