Crisis Response, Recovery and Resilience of Community Events: The Case of Kitchener and COVID-19

Abstract

The COVID-19 global health pandemic exacerbated the fragility of festivals and events in communities. In a world where further disruptions to events and communities are inevitable, it is critical to understand what can support the crisis response, recovery and resilience of events, event organizations, and event ecosystems. In contrast to event tourism, this study emphasizes community-focused festivals and events planned for residents for the purposes of placemaking and community development. Drawing on the first-hand experiences of event stakeholders, it describes the evolution of festivals and events throughout the two year crisis response and recovery period. Through a lens of social capital, the study explores interorganizational relationships before, during, and after the pandemic. Event stakeholders with longstanding relationships and stronger organizational capacity were more resilient in the crisis. The scale and shock of the pandemic represented an exogenous pathway of social capital, whereby stakeholders were motivated to support one another in new ways during and emerging from the crisis. The findings inform a multi-dimensional framework of event management practices, event organizations, and event ecosystems. With an emphasis on the leadership role of local government, recommendations are offered for promoting resilience in community event ecosystems. The key contributions of the study are (a) continuing to establish the importance of placemaking festivals and events in post-pandemic communities; (b) adopting a multi-dimensional timeframe and holistic view of events and communities; (c) learning from the lived experiences of event stakeholders; and (d) engaging with social capital theory as a contribution to a theoretically fragmented field.