Bloc party

Eight years ago Michael Curry dreamed of organizing a networking event featuring live music for young professionals of color in Boston. Instead he and Darius McCroey nixed the live music, added free food, and created the Collaborative Cookout, a picnic that helps local organizations and businesses owned by or serving people of color to thank the public for its support. The cookout lured 500 people its first summer. Last July , the event had grown so successful that 3,000 people showed up.

This year McCroey and Curry set out to make Curry's vision of a music festival a reality. During the last week of June, Curry and McCroey sat in a Mattapan home with 10 volunteers to plan the Boston Soul Music Festival, which will take place Saturday (rain date Sunday ). It was part of a series of meetings McCroey and Curry headed in the last few months that reveal the organization and drama involved in putting an event like this together.

By June they had persuaded UMass-Boston to host the event and recruited such artists as Dwele and Raheem DeVaughn to headline. The focus is on neo-soul, the music genre popularized by John Legend , Anthony Hamilton, and Erykah Badu .

"We're talking about music that's closer to what R&B and soul music was about when we were kids, that started to disappear in the '80s for the most part when pop became the predominant music," says McCroey, 37, who runs the local cultural and social events website Downtime.

The Cookout and its beefed-up sibling, the soul festival, spotlight an ongoing problem in the Boston area. Even as the city's population of color has risen above 50 percent, few places exist where young urban professionals can comfortably gather socially, says Curry. Many flee the city to find culturally inclusive activities elsewhere. To further complicate matters, when large numbers of people of color do gather in the Boston area, it creates fear among some whites. In May, white Harvard students called the campus police about blacks hanging out in Harvard's quadrangle who ended up being fellow Harvard students.

"When you have thousands of us show up at a park," says Curry, 38 , a lobbyist at Blue Cross Blue Shield, "people don't know how to receive that."

More important to the pair, the festival will attempt to get more people of color interested in volunteering and combat trenchant healthcare disparities that leave communities of color in worse health than white ones. McCroey and Curry, who plan to change the theme of the festival each year, invited such organizations as the Mass Mentoring Partnership , MassVote , and Health Care for All , which will register people to vote, sign up volunteers, and offer health screenings throughout the day. The event will help these organizations connect with an often elusive group.

With the additional music and social elements, McCroey and Curry expect their audience to reach at least 4,000 this year. However, as the meeting unfolded in Mattapan just over three weeks before the event, it became clear that some aspects of the festival planning looked rather bleak.

"We really need volunteers," McCroey says to his core group of organizers. "If we can get 20 groups to provide five volunteers, our work will be done."

The number of businesses and organizations signed up to man tables during the event looked paltry as well. At the time of the meeting, only 18 organizations, including Alpha Kappa Alpha, Ameriprise Financial, and the NAACP, had signed up.

Terri Brown , 38, a volunteer focusing on vendor recruitment, suggested sending an e-mail blast to a variety of vendors to tell them about the opportunity. Alkia Powell , 33, whom Curry and McCroey recruited as an event planner for the festival, received a list of vendors from the organizer of UMass-Boston's annual Boston Folk Festival , which the Soul Festival models itself on, and suggests recruiting them. But Brown wonders if those vendors will be ethnically and racially appropriate.

"Part of the challenge," says Curry, 38 , a lobbyist at Blue Cross Blue Shield, "is finding out where to tap into vendors of color."

McCroey and Curry hope to make the soul festival an event as highly anticipated as the Essence Music Festival in New Orleans. "There's no reason in the world with the population we have," says Curry, "that we can't have this as well."

The idea sounded so good to UMass-Boston's top leaders that it was fairly easy to convince them to host the festival. The university's vice chancellor, Charlie Titus, received an e-mail pitch about the project from Curry and an in-person presentation from Powell. It helped that Titus knew Curry by reputation, that Titus had had friends attend past cookouts, and that Powell worked as an assistant to the director at the school's Center for Women in Politics.

It was a group, says Titus, "that was into . . . trying to provide people with a strong social outlet that would also cover community service and mentoring and all the kinds of things that we're into here." The event will also introduce a large number of people to the UMass-Boston campus, says Titus. Participants will take advantage of such campus amenities as the boat tours; local poets are expected to perform spoken word pieces at the dock.

During the last week of May, the core group of Powell, Curry, and McCroey held its second planning meeting at UMass-Boston's Ryan Lounge, overlooking the festival site. Powell handed out photocopies from the folk festival as a general outline for the locations of the main tent and various vendors. They began discussing where they would place the food tables, the paid vendors, and the health/volunteering organizations.

As talk turns to raising money to fund the event, it becomes clear that Curry and McCroey have different ideas about how to proceed. Curry, who's responsible for this aspect of the festival planning, says he's in the process of pulling in more sponsors. McCroey, who handles the entertainment half of the project, pushes for more involvement.

"I'm trying to reach people you haven't reached out to," McCroey says. "It doesn't become a conflict. Let me talk to Rocawear," he continues, mentioning the urban clothing line, which he believes could be open to sponsoring an urban event.

Curry ultimately relents: "You can start calling today," he tells McCroey.

The disagreement spotlights Curry and McCroey's different managing styles. When asked about their temperaments, Titus chuckles, then carefully says, "One is a little bit more laid back, more conciliatory. The other one is a 'I want it now, today'-type. . . . They're a good balance to each other."

During the meeting at UMass-Boston, McCroey is more blunt. "Mike is the touchy - feely one in the group," McCroey says. "I'm not."

A week later Curry, Powell, and McCroey are in downtown Boston pitching the event to eight representatives of health and social entities, including the Massachusetts Department of Public Health, Mass General Hospital's Disparities Solution Center, and the Sportsmen's Tennis Club . They explain why they wanted to focus on health and volunteerism at this year's event in a more organized way.

"There are a lot of individuals who don't know what resources are out there, what services they may qualify for, some of the things they should be doing proactively to maintain their health or improve their health," McCroey says. "So we're trying to make that information available."

The organizations are eager to participate because of the difficulties they have targeting people of color. One representative at the meeting, Mallory Chery , a mentor recruitment manager at Mass Mentoring Partnership, recently set up recruiting tables at the South Station T station and a fitness expo at the Hynes Convention Center. She says, "I can count on one hand how many African-American and Latino people I signed up."

She expects to have better luck Saturday. "At the soul festival," Chery says, "the market is already there."