Our Events
Rondo Avenue, Inc. hosts several events and partners with other organizations/businesses throughout the year to celebrate its history and to support its work and legacy.
Our efforts to have a broad conversation about Rondo and the potential for a land bridge, and to listen with great care, are taking another step forward today: A brand new online survey to solicit your feedback.
The survey is in six languages: English, Espanol, Hmong, Oromo, Somali, and Vietnamese.
Please distribute widely by copying and sharing the link! Rondo Land Bridge Community Survey
Rondo Avenue, Inc. and the Minnesota History Center has come together for the last several years to kickoff Rondo Days week at the popular series 9 Nights of Music on the Tuesday of week preceding the festival. 9 Nights of Music features the rich and vibrant rhythms and sounds of Minnesota’s multi-cultural music community with free outdoor performances at the Minnesota History Center every Tuesday in July and August!
The Rondo Days 9 Nights of Music will feature soulful and funky sounds from Bass Face X.
Listen to infectious music and get out your dancing shoes for saucy salsa, soulful Motown, and classic big band swing – co-sponsor Tapestry Folkdance Center provides instructors to lead the way.
and a picnic, or purchase food from the History Center’s Cafe Minnesota (no outside alcohol is permitted). Admission to museum exhibits is free on Tuesdays from 3-8 p.m.
The Rondo Senior Recognition Dinner occurs annually on the Thursday evening prior to the Rondo Days Parade and Festival. The dinner event offers an opportunity for 300 plus members of the old Rondo community to reunite and reminisce over a home cooked meal provided by Rondo Avenue, Inc.
In this day and age, staying healthy is at the top of the personal priority list for many of us. Rondo Avenue, Inc. partners with the Inner Cities Athletic Association (ICAA) to host the annual Frank Adams 5K Walk & Run to jump start the festival day. The walk and run route follows the same path as the Rondo Days Parade (in a roundtrip manner), beginning at the Hallie Q. Brown/MLK Center, through the Rondo community to St. Peter Claver Church and back to HQB/MLK.
The Rondo Days Parade begins at 10AM at St. Peter Claver Church and is routed through the Rondo neighborhood – with a variety of parade participants from Drill & Dance Teams, to Floats, to Politicians, Educators, Business Owners and Youth groups – to the festival grounds, where the entertainment stage generally launches the festival around 12PM and runs until 7PM. People come from near and far to celebrate the Rondo community.
The Annual Rondo Wine Tasting Fundraiser is a special spring time event and opportunity the adult community to come together for networking, socializing and reminiscing while consuming some wine and food.
Several brands and flavors of wine, sponsored by Selby Wine & Spirits, will be on display for you to SEE, SWIRL, SNIFF, SWISH & SAVOR. Your taste palates are in for a treat as there will also be some savory Hors d’Oeuvres.
A soup tureen. A cookbook. Black and white photographs. These are some of the artifacts that Rondo community members share with Macalester students to preserve their neighborhood’s history.
Last year in 2016, people who had lived in the neighborhood stopped by the Hallie Q. Brown Community Center, to share objects they associate with Rondo.
2017’s Remembering Rondo History Harvest is being held at Camphor United Methodist Church at 585 Fuller Avenue of Dale Street
At digitization stations, students scan or photograph artifacts for computer storage. At artifact interview stations, students record the stories behind the pieces. Neighborhood donors who wished to talk further are ushered into a separate room where longer oral interviews focusing on the lives of people in the Rondo community took place.
Students digitize the artifacts and interviews and add them to the Remembering Rondo website. Anyone with access to the Internet will be able to see the artifacts and learn the stories behind them through audio and video transcripts.