By When budget cuts struck the campus in 2009, the kaleidoscope festival, which served as a campus open house, became extinct.
Now, four years later, organizers are searching for private funds to revive the 25-year-old campus tradition.
Started in 1985 by then CSULB President Stephen Horn, the Kaleidoscope Festival was an annual event that brought almost 30,000 students, alumni and Long Beach community members to campus over the course of one day, according to David Sanfilippo, former Kaleidoscope Logistics Coordinator.
In 2009, the festival that cost nearly $100,000 to $115,000 to organize was canceled.
“We couldn’t do [Kaleidoscope] any longer because of the budget,” Sanfilippo said. “The budget had to be devoted more directly to all the things we needed to do to make the university survive.”
The festival, which took place on the last Saturday of April every year, hosted several campus clubs and organizations, departments and outside businesses.
“The focus [of the festival] was to be a campus open house … to the new and incoming students as well as to the community to kind of showcase the breadth of the campus,” Sanfilippo said.
According to Sanfilippo, who is also the director of Disabled Student Services, the festival would host about 160 booths. The event also hosted games for children and adults as well as multicultural food prepared by international students.
“I think everybody saw [Kaleidoscope] as a valuable program,” Sanfilippo said. “One that really was a nice way to bring the town and gown kind of approach, where you bring the town to the campus and they get to see what students do and what we do in terms of education.”
Despite Kaleidoscope’s four-year absence, Sanfilippo said he hasn’t given up on the possibility of reviving the program.
“We have attempted this year to try to resurface [Kaleidoscope] because we knew that we were in the budget crisis the last few years and that we couldn’t really attempt to [bring it back] till after, so we did it this year,” he said. “We’re seeking private funding so we can resurrect it … we think it’s an important event.”
Sanfilippo said if funding becomes available he hopes to bring kaleidoscope back as soon as next year.
“2014 is what we’re shooting for,” he said. “We’re hopeful that it can come back.”
According to Leland Vail, former director of the Kaleidoscope festival and undergraduate advisor at the Bob Cole Conservatory of Music, another obstacle that may arise in bringing back the event is that most students don’t know or remember kaleidoscope.
“The freshman class [from 2009] is the senior class this year – they were the last class to have be tangentially involved in kaleidoscope … so they might have some memory of the event, but they’re graduating this year,” said Vail. “We would be reselling it to people because nobody remembers.”
Senior international business and French major Orlando Torres, who enrolled at CSULB in 2008, is one of the few students who still remember the festival.
Torres said he stumbled on to the event during his first year as a freshman and was taken aback by the turnout and size of the event.
“It was one of the first things about this school that really impressed me,” Torres said. “It really showed what a big role [CSULB] has in the community and how involved students are with the school life.”
