What's Actually Changing When Coral Springs' Festival Of The Arts Returns

For nineteen years, the second weekend of March meant the same walk. Shoppers and gallery browsers filled the sidewalks under mature tree canopy at The Walk of Coral Springs, ducking between more than 200 artist booths, orchid tables, and two stages of live music. Ask around now and you'll get a different picture: soccer fields at Mullins Park, a city logo on the paperwork instead of a nonprofit's, and a return date that's still eighteen months out. The festival is coming back. It just won't be the same event that closed out its run in 2025, and the reason why says more about how these things actually get funded than most residents realize.

The event that drew 40,000 people and still couldn't pay for itself

The Coral Springs Festival of the Arts started in 2004, the brainchild of a local mortgage broker named Shirley Richards who reportedly heard that no festival that far west in Broward County could draw a real crowd. She built one anyway, run through a 501(c)3 nonprofit and produced with Howard Alan Events, a national promoter with dozens of art fairs across the country. Every March it took over The Walk with a juried show of 175 to 200-plus artists and crafters, paired since 2016 with Gardenfest, the Garden Club of Coral Springs' own orchid and native plant show held on the same weekend. Attendance ran 30,000 to 40,000 people a year, drawing families from three counties.

That number is the one worth sitting with, because it's the part of this story that contradicts the obvious assumption. A festival that size looks, from the outside, like a permanent fixture. It wasn't. Organizers ended the event after its 19th and final run on March 15 and 16, 2025, citing the financial burden of sustaining it and mounting difficulty keeping enough volunteers on staff year after year. Attendance was never the problem. The math behind a volunteer-run nonprofit trying to fund a two-day event on that scale was.

Before closing the books, the committee distributed what remained to a handful of South Florida nonprofits, including SOS Children's Villages, the Sawgrass Nature Center and Wildlife Hospital, the Coral Springs Community Chest, and the Parkland Memorial Foundation. It's a fitting last act for an event that spent two decades raising money for causes across the region, even as the festival itself proved unable to raise enough to keep its own lights on.

What the city changed to make it work this time

Within months of the final festival, city commissioners started pushing to bring the event back, but not on the old terms. Rather than relying on a volunteer nonprofit board to raise funds and produce the show year to year, the city issued a request for proposals in April 2026 seeking a professional firm to manage a new version of the event under a city contract. That structural shift is the clearest signal of what organizers believe went wrong the first time: an event this size needs a paid operator with a multi-year commitment, not a volunteer committee rebuilding its budget from scratch every winter.

Here's how the two versions compare on paper:

The contract length is worth pausing on. A two-year base term with the option to extend to six total years is the city buying itself the kind of continuity the old volunteer model never had. It's a bet that a longer runway, backed by a paid contractor instead of a rotating committee, is what keeps an event like this from quietly running out of steam again.

The venue swap changes more than the view

The Walk did more for the festival than provide a backdrop. Its tree-lined layout let organizers run a free shuttle between two parking areas, the Coral Springs Center for the Arts and the City Hall parking garage, ferrying attendees in every 15 minutes throughout the weekend. Shoppers could wander from an art booth into an actual storefront and back again, which is part of what made the event feel woven into downtown rather than dropped on top of it.

Mullins Park is a different kind of space. It's built for athletics, not foot traffic past shops, and the RFP documents describe the new event spreading across several of its soccer fields rather than threading through a commercial district. That likely solves a real logistical headache. A park built for large gatherings comes with more contiguous open space and presumably its own on-site parking, which could simplify or eliminate the old multi-lot shuttle system entirely. What it won't replicate is the sense of a festival happening inside the town's daily commercial rhythm. For a longtime attendee, that's the difference between browsing an art fair on your way to lunch and driving to a fairground for the day.

What we don't know yet

Proposals for the new event were due May 6, 2026. As of this writing in mid-August, no vendor has been publicly announced, which means the specifics of who will run the show, how it will be marketed, and whether it will carry the same name are all still open questions. A few things are worth watching for as more comes out:

• Whether Gardenfest returns in any form. The RFP's vendor categories list arts, crafts, candles, food products, and spices, with no explicit mention of the plant and garden vendors that had shared the bill with the original festival since 2016.
• Whether the new event keeps the free-admission model that made the original one accessible to any resident who wanted to walk through for an hour.
• Whether "spring 2027" holds. The documents describing the new event's target date were dated April 20, 2026, and the language used, "likely taking place," leaves some room for the date to shift.

For now, the honest answer for anyone who's circled the second weekend of March on their calendar for the better part of two decades is that there's a two-year gap between the last festival and the earliest possible return, and the event that comes back will be run by different hands, in a different park, under a different funding model than the one generations of Coral Springs residents grew up walking through.

If you're the kind of resident who's been going to this festival since your kids were in strollers, or since before you had kids at all, that gap is worth noticing. Traditions like this one are part of what makes a neighborhood feel like more than a collection of houses, and watching how a city rebuilds one after it falls apart tells you something about how the place actually works.

If you're weighing a move into Coral Springs, or thinking about what your own home might be worth in a market that still supports civic investments like this one, Timothy Byrne has spent more than two decades working these neighborhoods alongside his son Colin. Let's Connect if you'd like a local read on what's happening in your corner of Broward.