Living to a new kind of tune

Walter Trout Band performing at the 2018 Mississippi Valley Blues Festival.

The Mississippi Valley Blues Society is here to stay.

That’s the message volunteers and board members hope the community embraces after the society recently opened an endowment with the Quad Cities Community Foundation. “We’re serious about the longevity of this organization,” said David Klockau, the society’s head of marketing and communications. “If you’re a nonprofit and you want to stick around for a while, you have to get serious about it. Endowments are one way to do just that.”

Bob Clevenstine, president of the society, saw the value in partnering with the Community Foundation a long time ago. Today, he hopes their endowment will lay stable financial groundwork for the organization for years to come. After all, the society’s mission is simple: to preserve, educate, and celebrate the blues as an art form.

“It’s an amazing thing to watch such a loved local organization start an endowment with us,” said Anne Calder, vice president of development at the Community Foundation. “Aside from uniting people under a shared goal, endowments provide a simple, secure way for our community to support valuable nonprofits like the Mississippi Valley Blues Society.”

The society was founded in 1984 and has since weathered economic ups and downs, historic floods that have hampered several of their riverside festivals, and most recently, the global COVID-19 pandemic. “On top of all that, federal funding for the arts has declined in recent years,” Klockau said. “The future is now in the public’s hands. That’s why supporting the arts is possibly more important today than ever before.” 

Today, the society has a deeply engaged board who has completed important initiatives for the organization. “We’ve recently established an active presence in local schools, launched a new website, and continue to organize an annual—and widely popular—blues festival that draws hundreds of people each year,” said Klockau.

Blues music, and the arts more broadly, is a way for people to connect. It also offers space for people to share common ground, celebrate humanity, and better understand where they come from—and where they’re going. Thankfully, the Quad Cities region has a rich heritage of music. 

“The Mississippi brought blues music up from New Orleans, and from there it spread across the United States,” Klockau explained. “As a bi-state region on the Mississippi River, music is a big part of who we are. It’s also vital to our sense of community, especially this year.” 

He hopes that the society’s partnership with the Community Foundation will spur generosity from the community in all forms. “This is a perfect time to remind the community of who we are, and remember the importance of bringing people together through generosity,” he said. “Philanthropy fuels all that, and the Community Foundation is an essential supporter of it.”

Though the Quad Cities community may still need to wait a bit before the next in-person blues festival takes place due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the society has seen the power of music to bring people together time and time again, and has no doubt that power will survive our current moment. “At our last festival, I could see so many families coming in—both young and old. It was just so gratifying to see everyone coming together like that,” Klockau said. “It gives me hope for the future.”