Latin Community Services Inc

Our program utilizes The Arts and Humanities in an immersive interactive environment to promote an active lifestyle through authentic Latin American instructional dance workshops, zumba, sports clinics, dancing and diverse food options that are fresh with very little processing. Our Festival promotes unity and price but also serves as a stress free environment particularly for a demographic that over the last few years have seen a spike in stress related auto immune disorders and leads the nation in pre-term births over the last 3-4 years.

Unidos en la Musica: A Latin American Festival has 3 primary population targets:
1. That Latin Americans who are not from the USA instantly recognize their home in our festival and experience things they have not seen since they left their country.
2. That Latin Americans who are born here in the USA learn more about their culture through the arts and entertainment.
3. That attendees who are not Latin American are immersed in the best of what Latin America has to offer in a way that relates to them in order to inspire learning and exploration.

The goal of Unidos en la Musica: A Latin American Festival is to become the premier authentic Latin American Festival in North Florida which will increase our impact in the community as attendance numbers rise. Each section of the Festival serves as an individual platform towards our overall goals.

Our activities include:

Unidos en la Musica: A Latin American Festival features international, regional and local bands playing a variety of authentic Latin American styles. This includes bands that play on our main stage, our workshop stage as well as roaming bands that travel to various areas of the Festival which motivates the attendees to travel around the event and stay in one place.

Instructional Dance Workshops and Performances taught by World Champion Salsa and Bachata Dancers. There are 5 workshops throughout the day teaching various skill levels as well as Latin dance styles. 5 Performances will be performed on the main stage which inspires people to join the workshops and interact with the performers in a more immersive way.

Cultural exhibitions are performed throughout the day by professional folklore groups from the specific countries that they represent. Various regions and time periods are represented through dance, ritual and spoken word. These regions include Colombia, Panama, Peru, Bolivia, Mexico which includes an Aztec group and Brazilian Capoeira.

Typical Latin American games section for children as well a separate section for adults. Our goal in the Games section is to find games that are played in the USA that may have roots or similarities to typical games that are playing Latin America. We have volunteers teach children how to play so that they can learn while having fun. We also have Soccer and Baseball clinics to keep kids active and teach them about how the style of play differs in Latin America.

Unidos en la Musica is the First Latin American Festival ever in the Oldest City in the United States, St Augustine FL. This allows us to be trailblazers for the community, our first annual Festival had 4700+ attendees which was measured through ticket sales (online and at the door). We perform polls for location and demographic data online, as well as at informational kiosks in specific high traffic areas in the Festival. Other measures of program success are social media interaction, reach and program interest. All of which are showing exciting improvements over what we would consider as a successful program in our first year.