Residents of Rolde will have to make do without a lot of annual parties in 2025. The board of the Rolder Activities Foundation (RAS) is dissolving itself and that means the end for the time being for events such as the Boet’npop music festival, the village festival Oes Feessie, various markets and the local Oktoberfest.
The foundation is closing down after 17 years because of the ‘growing administrative burden’ and because it is becoming increasingly expensive to organize an event. A shortage of board members and ‘difficult cooperation with some other parties’ are also reasons to stop now.
Chairman Gezinus Jansen of RAS has difficulty with the fact that everything has now stopped. “It hurts me very much. We always organized everything with great pleasure and a lot of enthusiastic volunteers. But because so much is no longer allowed, the board members became less and less friendly.”
According to Jansen, it is absolutely not due to a lack of hands. New volunteers were added every year. There were now about eighty people who helped keep all the festivities running.
According to Jansen, the last straw for RAS was that the pop and rock festival Boet’npop cannot be held on the usual date this year.
Previous editions of the music festival have always taken place on the Grote Brink in the second weekend of July since 2017, but according to the chairman, this is not possible this year due to an event surrounding the 100th anniversary of the TT.
That event is the riding of the historic TT route, organized by the Oranje Vereniging Volksvermaken Rolde (OVVR). The famous motorcycle race first started in Rolde on July 11, 1925.
Margé Emmens, chairman of the OVVR, says that in her opinion the TT event does not have to stand in the way of Boet’npop. “It is not up to us to determine what RAS can and cannot do.”
Emmens thinks it’s a shame that her fellow villagers are quitting. “They have organized great events for Rolde for years that were well attended. RAS has always put a lot of effort into this.”