No more Queen Annapolisa. Apple Blossom Festival switches focus to youth leadership

The 89th Annapolis Valley Apple Blossom Festival is expected to draw big crowds through Sunday.

This is the first full-scale festival since the beginning of the pandemic.

In addition to apple trees in bloom, it will feature a number of events, including the traditional fireworks Friday night and the street parade Saturday. Both are in Kentville.

One thing that will be missing from this year's festivities will be the crowning of Queen Annapolisa.

Festival president Logan Morse told CBC Radio's Information Morning Nova Scotia that the emphasis this year will be on a revamped youth leadership competition.

Their conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity and length. 

Tell me about this year's festival and some of the work that went into it?

Festival planning started in the fall and this year we were back to full-scale after COVID-19. We're back in full force this year.

We have some new things happening this year. We had changes happen to the leadership competition.

We're really looking forward to things.

Can you tell me about the leadership competition and how it's different this year?

We opened up the competition to anyone and removed a lot of barriers.

There were barriers with regards to age and to location. There needed to be financial support from either a business or or the community.

We removed all of those barriers so anyone could self-nominate themselves or they could be nominated from the community to join the competition.

The whole intent was to make the competition more inclusive, to be able to involve more people and to really showcase and represent the youth leaders that we have in the Annapolis Valley.

When we talked to past leadership candidates, the best prior to both the competition that they told us was that they were able to learn a lot of life skills to network, to be owed into the community, to learn how to public speak, to build their resumé and engage with the public.

That's exactly what we're doing with the changes that we made to the competition. We have six this year and hoping to have lots more as we move forward and in terms of new events this year.

In terms of new events this year that people haven't seen before at the festival, what can we expect?

One new thing that we have is a foam party, which is happening on Saturday, which is a great family event.

We have a number of returning and expanded events like the ciders and sliders events, the Black Women in Excellence vendor Market and, of course, favourites like the fireworks, the children's parade, the grand street parade.

A big focus for us was ensuring that the festival was inclusive and welcoming to everyone in our community.

We know that we've had a lot of newcomers move to the Valley since COVID has started and a lot of people that haven't even been to an Apple Blossom Festival before.