The 2021 Billings St. Patrick’s Day Parade, Celtic Fair and Street Party is cancelled due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. This was the first of many annual community events cancelled in 2020 due to COVID-19 public health concerns. Over the last 11 months our non-profit organization has worked closely with downtown business and property owners to provide tools and resources needed to keep the downtown community open and safe for visitors, workers, and residents.
Much has been learned, globally and locally, since March 2020; about the virus, best practices to keep community members safe, and ways to reduce its spread. The focus of reducing spread has been to help our healthcare resources from becoming overloaded so everyone in the community can receive the help they need. Katy Easton, CEO of the DBA adds “We are extremely thankful for the commitment, compassion, and sacrifice of the hardworking healthcare professionals here in Yellowstone County and across the nation. We remain hopeful that as more of our community is vaccinated for COVID-19 our organization is able to add larger events to the calendar.”
We will continue to add fun downtown happenings and micro-events to the downtown calendar. Micro-events are smaller events where participants are encouraged to pre-register or purchase tickets for; often there’s limited participation numbers to allow for COVID-19 safety precautions. Upcoming downtown micro-events include the Mug Crawl event, scheduled for February 13, 2021, a 2021 Chalk on the Walk event and a Purple 5k Run both to be scheduled soon. “We’re very hopeful that the second half of the year includes some of the larger community events we’ve all missed; like HarvestFest, the Christmas Parade and, Stroll. As of right now we’re unsure what the Summer event season will look like, but as soon as we can we will get more events on the calendar.” says Lindsay Richardson, DBA Director of Community Engagement and Events.
View the downtown events calendar for a full list of downtown happenings.