The New England Folk Festival is an annual weekend festival of traditional dance and music. It takes place in the Boston, Massachusetts region each spring. It is conducted by the New England Folk Festival Association. Both the festival and the association are colloquially known by the abbreviation NEFFA. NEFFA is a participatory festival; attendees are encouraged to participate in dancing, singing, musical jam sessions, and other activities. It is run by volunteers and all the performers are volunteers as well. The festival and the association has introduced thousands of New England and Massachusetts residents to the varied communities of traditional social and folk dance and folk music for more than 60 years, especially celebrating the living traditions of folk music and dance traditional to New England. Numerous New England folk dance callers, leaders and musicians have had formative experiences at the festival, and in turn have inspired and influenced thousands more through their performances, workshops, and enthusiastic participation. The festival has been influential in sustaining and reviving numerous folk dance traditions in New England. As a social dance festival, it is a community experience, the largest in New England of its kind, with about 5,000 combined admissions in the festival's four session periods. It is the inspiration for other similar traditional dance and music festivals throughout the United States and North America. For contra dance and folk dance leaders from New England and the United States, the festival has been an annual opportunity to perform, share experiences, insights, and further living traditions. The association also conducts a weekly contra dance series in Concord, Massachusetts. The NEFFA festival was founded in 1944, long before several more famous folk festivals, such as the Philadelphia Folk Festival (1962) and the Newport Folk Festival (1959). In recent decades, NEFFA has been influential as a model for dance and music festivals in New England, and nationally, including upstate New York's Flurry Festival (founded 1988) and Maine's Down East Country Festival (founded 1991). History The idea for NEFFA came about in the summer of 1944, in a discussion over coffee after a square dance at the Boston YWCA. The participants were Grace Palmer, director of the YWCA; Mary Gillette, head of the YWCA's physical education program; and Ralph Page, the popular New Hampshire caller who presided at the square dances. The series had been running for little more than a year, but was already drawing over