BELCHERTOWN — The Belchertown Cultural Council is run by a team of volunteers who strive to make Belchertown an enjoyable community by implementing arts and culture as an essential part of life in the town.
BCC Chair Melanie Donovan and her family moved to Belchertown in 2015. They started going to events at the Clapp Memorial Library and attended their first food truck event in 2019. “I love seeing events that bring people in the community together to celebrate and have a good time, so I joined,” Donovan recalled. “Once I joined, I saw how dedicated everybody was and how hard they worked. It’s really rewarding to know I’m a part of something ongoing like this.”
Past member Jennifer Whitehead explained, “The BCC has become very important to our community by hosting large events that highlight our strengths and to bring in our neighbors to fill in the areas that hadn’t been our strengths.” She added, “The BCC has helped to put the spotlight on our local businesses and artists. It has also aided in bringing more people to come visit our beautiful town.”
BCC is part of a network of 329 Local Cultural Councils (LCC) in the Commonwealth. BCC awards grants for cultural programming and organizes community favorite events including Food Truck Fridays and Winter Light Night. They receive money from the state of Massachusetts to support a local grants program and facilitate small endeavors, projects, artists, workshops, lecture series, anything that falls under the guidelines of being a cultural program for the town of Belchertown.
They facilitate those people in receiving grant money to host these programs. Every year starting in September is when the grant season opens and anyone who wants to apply can do so. There’s an online application process. Folks tell the council what they want to do, where they want to do it, why they want to do it, and then the BCC board votes whether to allocate them funds or not. The Council is also able to keep a portion of the state funds to host their own events, such as the Food Truck Friday’s series the BCC does in the summer and Winter Light Night. “That’s how we pay for those events to happen in the town which are free events for the town,” Donovan added.
Most of BCC’s events happen in the spring and summer. There’s an ongoing artist series put on by the Quabbin Art Association. Once a month, they have an artist come in and give a lecture. The Belchertown Community Band has concerts on the Belchertown Common on Thursday evenings in July and August, with a few more dates coming up. There is a program approaching at the Clapp Memorial Library in September called Edible Palette Knife Painting. The cookies are the canvas, the frosting is the paint and people are invited to create a work of art that will then be edible. The library will have a class for kids, teens, and adults. On Aug. 16, BCC will have their Food Truck Fridays on the Belchertown Common from 4-8 p.m. for an evening of food, community and entertainment.
What Donovan hopes for the Council in the future is to do more recruiting, find new volunteers and expand the programs that they’re able to offer. Though Food Truck Fridays and Winter Light Night are their two flagships, BCC would love to have more programs that they run and organize for the town. Going forward, the council wants to push to have programs that celebrate the history of their area, as well as looking for ways to spread cultural diversity and bring awareness of what else is out there in the world, bring it to Belchertown
To learn more about the Belchertown Cultural Council, visit their Facebook page or email bccgrantsmgr@gmail.com.
