We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Melina Harris. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Melina below.

Melina, appreciate you joining us today. We’d love to hear about a project that you’ve worked on that’s meant a lot to you.

Absolutely! I want to talk about how the Sweet Juice Collective got started. Sweet Juice is currently the love of my life. In March of 2022, the four founding members of Sweet Juice found ourselves playing separate shows around the city and coordinating set times to share our overlapping group of friends and bandmembers. Later that night, we sat in one of our favorite DIY venues, the Pharmacy, commiserating about our frustration with the larger musical events in the area being centered around capitalist values and cis-het, yt supremacist culture. Our friend Katie Briggs, of BunnyHopPHL, happened to have a truckload of food leftover from a catering event they had worked earlier that evening. They brought food into the venue, openly sharing with anyone that walked in. A warm feeling spread throughout the room like wildfire. It was that night that we decided to create a diverse and inclusive event that could blend the healing characteristics of live music with excellent hospitality and community outreach to create a unique and immersive experience. We wanted festival goers to leave not only entertained, but excited about being active members in their community.

The collective’s flagship event, Sweet Juice Fest, took place just a few months later in July of 2022, selling out at over 175 tickets and featuring 6 local, diverse musical acts. As this was our first event, our small yet mighty team pooled resources to bootstrap the festival that included an interactive craft station, a secluded rest zone, a local, diverse artisan marketplace, two food vendors, and a clothing swap/donation drop off. The event attracted media attention including a feature story with Paige Walter of Cherry-Veen Zine, a podcast interview with Left of the Dial, and support from local radio DJ John Vettese of WXPN. This year, we’ll be bringing back all the Sweet Juice Fest favorites and presenting an entirely new line up of 8 musical acts including nationally touring band, Shamir, and a youth band from local education nonprofit Rock to the Future. We even have the incredible Sound Museum Collective collaborating with my favorite band in Philadelphia, American Trappist, to create a live visual experience that will accompany their music.

Melina, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

Sweet Juice is a queer-artist-led collective whose mission is to inspire community action and engagement through immersive musical experiences, artistic expression, and joyful connection. With each event, we aim to inspire casual music-goers to get more deeply involved in their neighborhoods and strengthen the network of artists, individuals, and organizations working to vitalize their communities here in Philadelphia. In bringing greater visibility to underrepresented, local musicians and providing opportunities for connection and collaboration, we hope to fortify the meaning and magic that music can provide.

As a collective, we value people and place over efficiency and profit. We engage in practices that promote consensus, inclusivity and belonging, with an emphasis on centering the voices of queer and gender expansive artists and community members.

All four founding members of the Sweet Juice collective have had extensive experience booking and playing with touring acts as well as event planning within and outside of the music industry. We have seen the ways that BIPOC, queer, and gender-expansive artists, in particular, are mistreated and underestimated throughout every facet of the industry. Through these and other events, our hope is to strengthen Philadelphia’s connective tissue, advocate for fair compensation for musicians and artists, and raise funding and awareness of the organizations that work to address inequities in their Philadelphia communities. We want to bring back the culture of activism and resistance that was tied to artistic expression throughout the 60s and 70s.

Is there mission driving your creative journey?

No doubt. Now more than ever, as basic civil rights are stripped away from Black and trans* communities across the country, we must find new ways to catalyze the remarkable power of music and art by creating the circumstances under which performers and audiences can more deeply share, connect, heal and play. In particular, our goals are to center joy in communal experiences and celebrate/learn from local, diverse artists who we believe have a particular gift to offer their communities.

By ‘centering joy’ we hope to activate community engagement by immersing audiences in the kinds of artistic expression that can encourage and inspire a ripple of creative energy. Everyesingle one of us, ‘artist’ or not, is incredibly powerful! But it can be demoralizing to watch the television day after day and feel like we are powerless in the face of all of the violence and pain our world is experiencing right now. We know that Philadelphia is one of the most amazing and entrepreneurial cities in the world and we want to inspire everyone to contribute in whatever way they can by showcasing the folx who are doing the work. For example, check out the two featured organization’s at this year’s Sweet Juice Fest – Rock to the Future and Sound Museum Collective! All of these people have worked hard to see their ideas come to life, let nothing get in the way of their art, and are doing incredible things for their communities.

As far as the latter goal – Diverse folks across a multitude of spectra have already learned how to exist outside of what society chooses to celebrate or even see as ‘normal’. Therefore we have a unique perspective, and a creative approach to life and meaning-making that can drive the kinds of solutions we need to address our city’s ‘big, hairy’ problems. Artists are often incredible observers and communicators who are in touch with the people around them and have a pulse on the needs of their communities. They are exactly the folks we should turn to in order to better understand our world and the work that needs to be done. But artists aren’t only under-compensated for their time and talent, they aren’t paid for the social impact they have on their communities whatsoever. We hope to change that.

In your view, what can society to do to best support artists, creatives and a thriving creative ecosystem?

hiladelphia is a ‘majority minority’ city. If we want our economic and social ecosystem to thrive, to reduce violence and increase belonging and inclusivity, we need ALL Philadelphians to have equitable opportunities to share their unique talents.

In the music and art industries, this often comes down to property and capital. Who has money to promote and showcase artists? Who has the power to access resources to expensive equipment and education about production, audio engineering, etc.? Who has the venue space to host shows and make profit off of selling alcohol and charging for people to enter their space? We know who. We can all clearly see it. The Sweet Juice Collective was only able to throw this fest because of the deep generosity of our friends, community members, and supporters, most of whom are artists and musicians themselves.

When artists can come together to create opportunities for themselves, like what we’re doing, it can really change the power dynamic. That’s why funders and investors who want to support arts and culture in this City need to fund diverse artist-led initiatives – not just for one time events like this, but in sustained and dynamic ways that will allow us to build the infrastructure to support our long-term vision(s).

If you’d like to learn more about how you can support our work, please get in touch with me at info@sweetjuicefest.com

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.sweetjuicefest.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sweetjuicefest/?hl=en
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/i/flow/login?redirect_after_login=%2Fsweetjuicefest
• Ticket link: https://sidedooraccess.com/shows/it3NvDqJGMeJEIdrtR7v

Image Credits
Poster Art – Andy Carter Photos – Paige Walter and Rob Pfieffer