The Peach Blossom Festival is a student-run event held annually at Fresno State since 1959 that celebrates oral interpretation, performance and literature among youth in the San Joaquin Valley. This year, the festival will take place on March 6-7 in various locations and classrooms around campus.
Originally designed for students from kindergarten through sixth grade, the Peach Blossom Festival is expanding this year to include a few schools with seventh and eighth graders.
Ladonna Hayes, director of the Peach Blossom Festival, is expecting 120 schools to attend and over 3,600 students, teachers and families will be attending.
Many of these students come from isolated and rural areas, so this festival also exists as a way to highlight Fresno State for kids that don’t get to normally be around a collegiate environment.
“It’s kind of turned into also an event that allows these young children to come on a university campus, most of them probably for the first time,” Hayes said. “We’re also kind of outreach, in a sense.
”Each school may submit one entry, with the option of either solo performances or groups of up to 10 students. Performances must not exceed five minutes in length and schools also have the flexibility to choose the language of the performance, including bilingual performances.
“They can come and do a bilingual presentation performance,” Hayes said. ”So it allows them to feel most comfortable if they are bilingual to express themselves that way.”
The Peach Blossom Festival provides a platform for students to cultivate their public speaking, creativity and love for literature while learning to express themselves in front of an audience.
Haydee Sanchez, a committee member of the Peach Blossom Festival’s outreach team, explained that while the kids will be learning about literature and performance, what a student can gain from the event can be applied to more than just school.
“I think they’ll benefit from getting confidence,” Sanchez said. “I know many of them are shy. I feel like it’s an opportunity for them [to] step out of their comfort zone.”
The social media and photography co-lead for the Peach Blossom Festival, Yasmine Gaber, emphasized that. She says that this event creates skills and abilities that will be carried beyond school.
“This is a good place for them to find their voice and see what they’re passionate about,” Garber said. “It’s basically practice for something that they would want to do in the communication field. You’re learning how to talk to people, how to plan an event, how to network with others.”
For students on the Peach Blossom committee, this is an opportunity for class credit. For others, this is a way to foster their skills, whether that be abilities for a career or being a part of a community.
“I’m learning a lot more about graphic design and how to make things marketable in the social media sense and stuff like that,” Garber said. “And without this opportunity, I feel like I would have not learned as much as I did.”
Students can volunteer to do a handful of different tasks, like judging performances or chaperoning the students while they are on campus during the event.
