A trailer roams all over Boise each summer. It has everything you need for a block party
An artsy trailer wanders around Boise from weekend to weekend. It has everything necessary to throw a block party, including tables, chairs, water jugs, ice chests, a speaker with microphone, lawn games, a first aid kit, a fire extinguisher and more.
Every spring, groups rush to book the trailer for a summer weekend before it is too late.
The city of Boise’s block party trailer is free for community groups and neighborhood associations to reserve once a year from May through October.
The trailer can be used only on weekends, and only for one event each weekend. City staff deliver it to the user on Friday and pick it up on Monday. Energize Our Neighborhoods, a 10-year-old city program that works with the city’s neighborhood associations, requires that all community events for which the trailer is used are open and free to anyone.
“We’d like to make it available to folks who are community-building and encouraging that social gathering in a way that is open and free to anyone,” Nicole Carr, program manager at Energize, said in a phone call.
Early each spring, the trailer’s calendar becomes live. Any group in Boise can request it on a first-come, first-served basis. Carr said the trailer is typically booked for every weekend during the season.
The Central Foothills Neighborhood Association hosted its annual social gathering at Stewart Gulch Park on Sunday afternoon. About 60 people attended.
Barbara Strauss, a board member of the association, said they used the trailer twice before. If they didn’t have it, they would have to rely on every board member to bring all the things needed to throw the party, Strauss said.
“You never have to worry about all that,” Strauss said.
The trailer includes essentials like trash bins and safety cones. A shade canopy, jump ropes, hula hoops, and games like corn hole, checkers and giant tumbling block tower were added last year.
Nonetheless, the association brought additional shade tents, crafts activities for kids, food and snacks, said Alison Rock, president of the association.
“We wouldn’t have the capacity or the funding to buy all these things in the trailer,” said Maggie Benedetti, vice president of the association,.
Rock also said that, if the city didn’t offer the block party trailer program, the association would have to store all the items needed in its members’ own garages. The city stores the trailer in the Parks and Recreation Department’s storage lots.
The block party trailer was introduced in 2019, after city staff members learned about the idea at a training conference and brought it to Boise. Cities in other states like Arizona, Texas and Colorado already had block party trailers at the time, Carr said. NeighborWorks rents out a block party trailer to community groups, nonprofits and private entities in Pocatello.
Boise’s neighborhood associations use the trailer for small-scale gatherings with a couple of dozen people and events with hundreds of people, like the Ustick in Bloom annual celebration of the West Valley Neighborhood Association that took place June 8 at Redwood Park. The material provided in the trailer is the same for every event.
Energize worked with the Boise Department of Arts and History to choose a local artist to design artwork for the trailer. Noble Hardesty, a Boise painter and digital illustrator, was selected, and his contemporary design was fabricated into a vinyl wrap that covers the trailer.
The city requires those requesting to use the trailer to provide information on the type of event and how many people they anticipate will attend.
Rock said most neighborhood associations schedule their events on the same summer weekend each year. The Central Foothills Neighborhood Association has to schedule its annual event on a different weekend than most associations to make sure the trailer will be available, Rock said.
The city has only one trailer. There are no plans to expand the program, Carr told the Idaho Statesman in a text.
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