Sundown Salute is a huge project – too much for one person.

That’s the sentiment heard earlier today on JC Now on the Talk of JC from Sundown Salute Board President Nikki Londene.

“There definitely needs to be more than one person that can be not only accountable for dispersing the work load – but basically, instead of just putting it all on one person’s shoulders like we have in the past, we’ve kind of set up a plan to divvy up the work load…we feel like it’s going to make the organization work more effectively and we’re going to get a lot more accomplished,” said Londene.

Not only will one person no longer have the sole responsibility of everything Sundown Salute, but there will be group efforts in all aspects of the decision making process. There are several subcommittees that were formed for that reason.

“We have a fundraising committee, we have somebody who is working on just the musical talent and the entertainment, we do have somebody who is over the parade – well, we’re looking for somebody to be over the parade, we have one subcommittee that is just dedicated to vendors and handling that, we have somebody who is dedicated to advertising,  we have somebody who is over the Veteran’s ceremony; so we’ve basically taken all of the events of that weekend and broken them down into committees,” said Londene. “So a few people can go and do the leg work on that and bring it back to the Board and we can all make decisions together.”

Gathering people to volunteer their time and efforts wasn’t difficult for the newly reorganized committee.

“[We’re] members of the community, obviously we love Junction City, we love the event itself – it does bring a lot of people into Junction City…so we didn’t want to see that die, and a lot of people have put a lot of work into this over the past 30 years so we wanted to continue the tradition,” said Londene.

Sundown Salute 2017 will run from June 30th through July 4th. Ottaway Amusements Carnival and park vendors will be present all five days; there is still uncertainty on entertainment and musical performers.

The Sundown Salute Board of Directors and committees will continue to work on fundraising as a long term effort.