Joint Masajid Eid Celebration
Monday, September 5th, 2011
As a member of the Southern California Eid Festival Group (SCEFG), a group of masjids in SoCal working in collaboration to organize special community events, we would like to humbly ask for your forgiveness for the inconveniences many of you suffered yesterday, Sunday September 4th 2011 whilst attending The Joint Masjid Eid Picnic held at Irvine Regional Park.
The SCEFG sold a total of 2,000 tickets for the Eid Picnic event, and had planned for food and transportation for 3,500. The estimated attendance yesterday was closer to 8,000 people! This large gap in estimate caused major logistical issues including having the park officials close entrance gates to all vehicles for over 4 hours, causing major inconveniences in parking, and in dropping off and picking up passengers. While we had contingency plans in place for off-site parking and transportation, the number of visitors was so much higher than expected, that these plans were not effective enough.
We have scheduled a series of meetings with the planning committee to immediately discuss lessons learned, from overall concept and design to the specific details so that we can create a better, more effective plan for this kind of event in the future. Many of you have been kind to offer us your gratitude and support; and through your participation have showed us the interest and desire for this type of event to be held again in the future. We pledge to learn from each inconvenience you faced and make this event much better next time.
It is imperative that we take a moment to thank all of the volunteers and vendors who worked tirelessly through the day, never quitting, and putting their hearts into finding creative solutions every minute to address challenges that arose. We recognize the organizers, volunteers, vendors, police department, park rangers and you the visitors were all impacted and overwhelmed with the large unexpected turnout. We were all put in a very difficult position. Please accept this statement as our sincere apology to each of you.
If you would like to share your thoughts and feedback, please write an email to events@icoi.net. As always, we welcome your feedback, as it will help us plan for a better event next time.
Jazakullah Khair,
Islamic Center of Irvine
Member of Southern California Eid Festival Organizing Group