Many Worlds, One Calendar: How Discover Albany Became Its Community's Event Matchmaker

By: Kyle Huff

| Updated Jul 09, 2026

Learn how Discover Albany stepped into the role of community connector, helping to unify celebrations, coordinate partner programming, and prove that a destination organization's value often lies in what happens behind the scenes.

Maeve McEneny Johnson began her journey in hospitality as a local historic tour guide. She wrote Albany's first downtown ghost tour nearly 20 years ago, thinking it would be temporary, and it stuck. Along the way, she built a career around connecting people to places, creating itineraries that wove together the county's many stories. When she joined Discover Albany as Director of Community Engagement, she brought that same instinct with her.

“I already had this idea of itineraries in my mind,” she said. That perspective would shape how the organization approaches community events today.

A Region with a Lot Going On

Albany County, New York, is a region with over 400 years of European history, deep Native American roots, a thriving immigrant community, and an event calendar that can be overwhelming in the best possible way. Tulip Festival kicks off in May. Alive at Five brings free concerts through summer. Pride celebrations span all of June. And that's before the county's own festivals, cultural offerings, and neighborhood activations layer in.

The challenge wasn't a lack of things to do. It was that many of these experiences existed independently, often overlapping, sometimes competing for the same audience on the same weekend. Discover Albany saw an opportunity not to create more events, but to help the ones already happening work better together.

A Weekend Worth Celebrating

June is one of Albany County's busiest months, with Pride running all month alongside a packed calendar of summer events. It's also when the community comes together for Juneteenth, a weekend that had grown to include offerings hosted by nearly a dozen organizations across the county. But the celebrations were scattered with no throughline, and a free trolley that already existed struggled to function as a link between the sites.

Through the organization's Cultural Heritage and Tourism (CHAT) program, the Underground Railroad Education Center reached out to Discover Albany with a challenge: multiple Juneteenth events were happening across the city, but the programming wasn't being promoted or presented as a unified whole.

Discover Albany stepped in to pull the weekend together. They created a dedicated Juneteenth page on their website, designed a flyer for partners, and mapped out the trolley route connecting the celebration sites so that visitors could move between them as a single cohesive experience. After ensuring the logistics held up in 2025, the team refined the approach for 2026 with simplified materials and an expanded web presence to accommodate the growing list of activities.

The biggest logistical challenge turned out to be the calendar itself. With summer events in full swing, making sure Juneteenth programming didn't conflict with other partner activations required careful coordination and honest conversations about timing.

We aren't the event planners ourselves. But it's about making sure that you have the right people in that room so that your event is successful and that we're supporting each other.

Maeve McEneny JohnsonDirector of Community Engagement, Discover Albany

From Watch Parties to a Haunted City

The approach extends well beyond Juneteenth. When the 2026 FIFA World Cup arrived, the organization secured a New York State Community World Cup Grant through Empire State Development to host community watch parties. But rather than operate in a silo, they pulled in every partner they knew would be activating around the games: Wolff’s Beer Garden, The City of Albany Cultural Affairs Office, the Empire State Plaza, and the Albany County's executive office.

“We knew we weren't going to be the only ones with a watch party,” McEneny Johnson said. “So we pulled all those partners together to figure out the schedule so that we weren't cutting into each other, that people could have multiple experiences, and we were collaborating and not competing.”

The result was a calendar of watch party experiences ranging from high-energy outdoor gatherings at Jennings Landing to family-friendly screenings at the Empire State Plaza, promoted through one coordinated message.

Then there's Halloween. Albany has a surprisingly deep connection to the holiday, including a chaotic early 1900s festival that drew over 100,000 people. McEneny Johnson wrote an American Rescue Plan Act grant through the City of Albany to launch the All-Hallow E'en Festival, packaging the city's existing October programming, from Capitol ghost tours to 19th century true crime walks, into a cohesive seasonal identity while funding local artists and performers to activate downtown spaces.

“We got attention for being a Halloween destination,” McEneny Johnson said. For a region better known for its history and fall foliage, that shift in perception is exactly the kind of impact a destination organization can drive when it helps a community lean into what makes it unique.

Making the Case by Showing Up

For McEneny Johnson, communicating the value of Discover Albany's work comes down to presence and trust. She stays present at community events, builds relationships with elected officials and their staff, and looks for ways to add value wherever she can. During COVID, that meant sending grant opportunities to partners who were struggling, a gesture that earned lasting goodwill.

Looking ahead, Discover Albany is deeply involved in the Revolutionary War 250 commemoration, with an eight-year plan that extends well beyond the nation's semiquincentennial celebrations. Longer term, the team is developing a permanent heritage trail connecting the region's Revolutionary War sites.

For other destinations looking to better support their event landscape, McEneny Johnson's advice is practical: don't be a stranger, and don't always start at the top.

“Reach out to their scheduler,” she said. “Don't go right to the mayor. Make it low pressure. And don't always go to the director at a museum. Go to the boots on the ground. They can escalate it.”

Albany County's events don't lack energy or ambition. What Discover Albany provides is the connective tissue that turns individual moments into a shared experience.

Additional Resources

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Author

Kyle Huff

Director of Growth Marketing, Tempest

Kyle Huff is Tempest’s Director of Growth Marketing, where he oversees the company’s efforts to enhance the visibility, engagement, and growth of destination partners through forward-thinking SEO, creative storytelling, and performance marketing techniques. Before joining Tempest, Kyle served as the Content Manager for the Philadelphia Convention & Visitors Bureau, where he promoted the city of Philadelphia to a global audience of meeting professionals, event planners, and international visitors.

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