Want to sponsor a princess? The Daffodil Parade is back and it’s looking for funding
A gown, shoes and tiara are needed to complete the outfit of a Daffodil princess.
This year, The Daffodil Festival is asking community members to help fund some, if not all, of the princesses’ regalia.
Sponsor-a-Princess kicked off on Jan. 14. People can choose to purchase items such as earrings and gloves for a princess. As of Jan. 25, the festival raised about $10,000 or 77 percent of its goal, spokesperson Morgan Bernardi said.
There is about $700 worth of regalia left to fundraise as of Jan. 28, Bernardi wrote in an email.
“We are built upon the backs of our community members and organizations who want to see us succeed,” Bernardi said. “We were trying to think of ... an effective way to fundraise (where) community members help in a way that is tangible.”
The princesses’ regalia usually costs between $15,000 to $25,000 per year, Bernardi said. The regalia is worn during the Daffodil Parade and other events. The total cost to run the parade could easily reach about $100,000, she said.
Princesses are not expected to pay or fundraise for their regalia. If the festival does not reach its goal by late February, it will look for other sources of funding to fill in the gap, Bernardi said.
“Unfortunately — leading up to and during COVID — we’ve dwindled down on our personnel and in funding,” Bernardi said. “I believe everybody’s been hit in that kind of manner so that kind of brings us to getting more creative with our forms of fundraising.”
This year’s parade, in its 89th year, is scheduled for April 9. The parade will go through Tacoma, Puyallup, Sumner and Orting all in one day.
In 2021, the princesses participated in a stationary parade at the Spring Fair at the Puyallup fairgrounds. The festival did something similar to Sponsor-a-Princess that same year, but “on a much lower scale,” Bernardi said.
“It was one of those things that kind of ended up just being an idea that exploded into something bigger, and we rolled with it at the time with a lot less preparation,” Bernardi said. “It was something that we wanted to try again this year.”
In 2020, the entire parade was canceled due to COVID-19, Bernardi said.
The festival is volunteer-run, and it is sponsored by groups such as the Washington State Fair, The Old Cannery Furniture Warehouse and the Puyallup Tribe of Indians, Bernardi said.
“We have zero people on payroll,” Bernardi said. “We just do everything based off of donations or sponsorships.”
Aside from the parade, the festival places princesses in a royalty program where they get to hone their skills and prepare for the “adult world,” Bernardi said. This year’s roster has 23 high school students from participating Pierce County schools such as Bonney Lake, Eatonville and White River.
Through the program, students participate in resume workshops and mock job interviews. The students also do community service projects with local nonprofit organizations such as the Emergency Food Network in Lakewood.
Some of the students who participate in the royalty program are student athletes, Bernardi said. Some excel in academics, and some have plans to go into military academies after graduating, she said.
Students receive between $1,000 to $2,000 in scholarship funds through the royalty program, Bernardi said. The student who gets the title of queen also gets an additional $5,000 from the Washington State Fair Foundation.
“The Daffodil Festival is a really important tradition embedded in Pierce County for a multitude of reasons and one of those being that it’s always been there,” Bernardi said. “It’s a signal for spring for a lot of people in the Pierce County community.”
This story was originally published January 31, 2022 at 5:00 AM.
