After years of funding community events and festivals out of pocket, Chicago’s beloved shop and community anchor the Silver Room is crowdsourcing to retire lingering debt from past Silver Room Block Parties and plan for the future.
Eric Williams, founder and owner of the Silver Room, says that the campaign is designed to even up with “20 to 30 different vendors and artists” who contributed in the past to Silver Room Block Parties.
Originally begun in Wicker Park, the Silver Room Block Party moved with the store to Hyde Park in 2015. At the time, Williams told 5 Mag‘s Czarina Mirani that for the first 10 years the Block Party “was completely free. I mean I lost thousands of dollars. I came out of pocket around $5,000 to $7,000.
“A big reason it was so much fun was because there was no big banner with a Coca-Cola logo on it. I was being naive thinking we could actually finance it ourselves.”
When we hear talk about local merchants being part of their community, the Silver Room is a model for what that actually looks like.
Relocated to Hyde Park, the street festival nevertheless continued to thrive, evolving into a multi-day, ticketed festival at Oakwood Beach — “a beacon of joy, unity and cultural enrichment for both local residents and visitors around the world.” The 2023 Block Party was the last.
“In 2019, we raised just $7,000 in donations for an event that cost nearly $300,000,” Williams wrote in an update after the crowdfunding campaign was launched. “When we moved it to Oakwood Beach to host a ticketed version, production costs soared to $1.5 million.”
“The Silver Room has nurtured dreams, launched careers, and created a platform for people to be seen, heard, and celebrated — often with little to no outside funding and, truthfully, almost all coming out of my own pocket. That model is no longer sustainable, and the journey has come with a deep emotional and financial toll.”
Central to the Silver Room’s campaign is the notion that Williams and the store have provided a public good to the communities they’ve been in, without asking for money. This is undoubtedly true: the Silver Room, in any estimation, does more for the community than any retail store I can think of, not just passively “participating” in the neighborhood but acting as a catalyst for the arts in Chicago. When we hear talk about local merchants being part of their community, the Silver Room is a model for what that actually looks like.
The initial goal is to raise $200,000 via crowdsourcing in 30 days. The campaign has raised $42,000 at the time of writing.
Photo: Silver Room Block Party via gofundme.com
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