There are so many businesses and organizations that want to sponsor a tree in the St. Apollonia Dental Clinic’s annual Festival of Trees in Presque Isle that Sherry Chamberland has to put some on a waiting list. There isn’t a venue big enough in central Aroostook County.
“If I had a big enough place to do it, I could have 100 trees,” Chamberland, a festival co-chair, said Friday.
That’s how great the interest is in the festival, which is the single major fundraiser for St. Apollonia, a nonprofit clinic that serves uninsured and underinsured children in Aroostook County.
Now in its 11th year, the festival has exploded since it began with 25 trees in 2013. This year, 75 fully decorated holiday trees and accompanying gift items will fill the gymnasium at Northern Maine Community College for the three-day event that runs Friday, Dec. 5, through Sunday, Dec. 7.
Members of the festival committee will draw winners during the afternoon of Dec. 7 out of a pool that has previously been as many as 400,000 raffle tickets. It costs $5 for 10 tickets, which attendees can walk around and place in buckets for the chance to win trees of their choosing.
The weekend has been a hugely successful fundraising event for the clinic, bringing in more than $170,000 in 2024 to help bridge the gap between MaineCare reimbursement and the actual cost of care.
“It’s so much more effective than writing campaigns,” Chamberland said. “Donor fatigue is real. We understand that. People are constantly being asked to give to one cause or another, and they’re all equally deserving. So we were looking for a way that we weren’t just asking for something. We were giving something back.”
The thousands of visitors and their contributions have helped St. Apollonia run smoothly, even as the system around it does not. In March, when the Maine Department of Health and Human Services announced that MaineCare had run out of funding of pay providers in full until the start of the new fiscal year, funding from the festival helped hold the clinic over.
“Not one child had to miss an appointment, and all the staff got paid,” Chamberland said. “The clinic was able to run business as usual while we waited for MaineCare to get that sorted out because we had these funds from prior years.”
New to the festival this year, the committee will be livestreaming the drawing of winners on its YouTube channel. It has also launched a dedicated Facebook page to post updates about the event and will for the first time be handing out the Star of the Festival Award to a committee member that “we feel embodies the spirit of the Festival of Trees,” Chamberland said.
There will also be a Christmas-themed photo backdrop added to the gymnasium.
“I know this sounds cliche, but it truly has been an honor and a privilege to work with this amazing group of people,” Chamberland said. “They’re constantly thinking about ways to make it better and the goal of providing dental services to these children is always the top priority.”
