The Story of Woofstock

In 1993, people gathered at Chagrin Falls High School for a new Geauga Humane Society fundraiser called Put Your Best Paw Forward. The event would eventually change names, locations and grow into a festival, becoming something none of the people there could have fully imagined. But some of what would define it for the next three decades was already present: dogs and their people, fundraising for animals, and an illustrated event T-shirt.

Two years later, Marc and Debbie Kritzer were among the people walking at Punderson State Park with their dog, Lucky Puppy. Beside them were their friends Steve and Ellen Silber and their husky. Marc remained deeply connected to Rescue Village and the event over the decades. He volunteered, participated, and he and Debbie became significant supporters of the organization. He also kept the event T-shirts.

Marc understood exactly what those early event T-shirts represented. They were an archive, preserving the names, artwork, jokes and changing identity of an event he had watched grow. Years later, he gave a collection of those shirts to Rescue Village Executive Director, Ken Clarke, because he wanted Clarke to have them. Clarke kept them, and eventually, while reconstructing the history of Woofstock, brought them back out and began reading them alongside old photographs, programs, maps and other records. Current volunteer Connie Barret, who volunteered for the event in the early years and raised funds over 6k with her “Leash Brigade” friends, also brought in some old t-shirts for the archive.

Together, the collection tells quite a story: cartoon dogs and cats, puns, annual themes, different names, different places, and an organization changing around an event that kept going. The thing we now call Woofstock had already lived several lives before anyone called it Woofstock.

It started with a walk.

Put Your Best Paw Forward

On October 9, 1993, the Geauga Humane Society, now Rescue Village, held Put Your Best Paw Forward at Chagrin Falls High School. It was a walk for animals and one of the organization’s first major fundraising events. The first walk raised $35,000, with the money helping the Humane Society work toward a new and larger shelter.

But the larger story was the community response. People came out to support the animals, and they kept coming back. The 1993 event also established a tradition that would last: an illustrated fundraising T-shirt. Its artwork showed a person walking a dog and announced, “This walk is for the dogs.” The shirt was part souvenir, part visual identity and part fundraising tool.

The following year, the second annual Walk for Animals moved to Punderson State Park in Newbury. Cleveland television personality and longtime animal advocate Dick Goddard attended and helped bring attention to the fundraiser. The illustrated shirts continued, and so did the playful visual personality they established.

Long before anyone called the event Woofstock, animal artwork was already part of its identity. Early shirts featured dogs, cats, jokes and annual themes. There was Paw Trek. There was Keep On Walkin’. Animals wore sneakers. Dogs carried signs. From the beginning, the event understood that raising serious money for animals did not require looking serious all the time.

Meanwhile, the walk itself was changing.

The Ramble Becomes a Festival

As the years passed, the fundraising walk became known as the Ramble, while more and more activity developed around it. By the event’s 10th year, in 2002, it was being presented as the KeyBank Rescue Village Ramble & Four-Footed Festival at Punderson State Park.

By then, “festival” was no exaggeration. The walk remained central, but the day also included live music, a cookout, Vendors’ Rrrow, the Blessing of the Animals, trainer demonstrations, flyball, search-and-rescue demonstrations, agility, canine contests and games, adoptable animals, sponsors and celebrity guests. One promotional piece summed up the proposition remarkably well: enjoy a great day with your dog and raise money for sick, injured and abused animals at Rescue Village. That remains a pretty good description of the event today.

The old festival maps tell the same story. Demonstrations and game rings, vendor areas, music, food, registration, trails and activities were spread throughout the site. What had begun in 1993 as a fundraising walk had become a substantial community festival.

Jenny Campbell was already part of that world before Woofstock had its current name. The nationally syndicated cartoonist was creating and donating artwork for Rescue Village and the Ramble during the Ramble & Four-Footed Festival years. One surviving image shows a cartoon dog holding a sign asking, “Are you ready to RAMBLE?”

So when the next major change arrived in 2006, neither the festival nor its playful visual culture was new. Only the name was.

Becoming Woofstock

In 2006, Rescue Village officially renamed the festival Woofstock. By then, dog events around the country were discovering the irresistible Woodstock joke, but the name fit Rescue Village particularly well. Dogs, people, music, cartoons, silliness and communal gathering were already part of the event. Woofstock simply gave all of it a new visual and cultural vocabulary: peace signs, flowers, bright colors, music, tie-dye and a little flower-power absurdity.

The name changed. The fundraiser didn’t. It was still about bringing people together and raising money to help animals.

The 2006 Woofstock was held at Centerville Mills. By 2009, the festival had moved to Holden Arboretum, where it continued to grow. Fundraising remained front and center. In 2008, Woofstock raised $71,000, making it Rescue Village’s largest fundraiser at the time.

The annual T-shirt continued, too. During one period, the official tie-dye Woofstock shirt became a particularly memorable fundraising incentive: raise $35 and you could receive the shirt, with more substantial incentives available to those who raised more.

The tie-dye shirt was a newer Woofstock tradition. Selling an illustrated event shirt was not. Rescue Village had already been doing that since 1993.

A New Home at the Polo Field

After its years at Holden Arboretum, Woofstock moved to the Cleveland Metroparks Polo Field in Chagrin Falls in 2017. The move gave the festival room to expand: more parking, vendors, activities, dogs and people.

One of the event’s oldest traditions paused, however. The Ramble did not make the move to the Polo Field. For several years, Woofstock continued without it, developing into a larger community event built around live music, food, shopping, dog games, contests, agility, adoptable animals and an expanding collection of attractions.

Eventually, that same field would become the setting for the Ramble’s return.

Keeping Woofstock Going

Then came 2020.

COVID made the normal Woofstock festival impossible. Rescue Village kept the tradition alive with a smaller COVID-era observance built around virtual and socially distanced activities rather than the usual gathering at the Polo Field. It preserved the continuity of Woofstock, but the full festival did not take place.

The annual festival returned in 2021. More than 3,500 people and 2,500 dogs attended, raising approximately $120,000 for Rescue Village, breaking a record of the most funds raised in the event’s history.

That unusual COVID year also explains a small wrinkle in the event’s numbering. Woofstock’s history reaches continuously back to 1993, while 2020 is not counted among the full festivals. The 2026 gathering is therefore Rescue Village’s 33rd festival.

And another period in the event’s history was about to begin.

A New Era for Woofstock

Executive Director Ken Clarke joined Rescue Village earlier in 2021 and experienced his first Woofstock that September. He saw a festival with decades of history, enormous community affection and considerable room to grow.

Beginning in 2022, Clarke and Director of External Affairs, Lisa Ishee, began building the next version of the event. Sponsorship expanded, programming and fundraising became more ambitious, and new attractions appeared alongside longstanding traditions.

The Ramble returned, but it wasn’t a return to the three-mile walks of the Punderson years; Woofstock had become a very different kind of event. The new Ramble became a ceremonial fundraising march around the festival grounds, preserving the meaning of the original walk in a form suited to modern Woofstock.

Clarke also proposed another new tradition in 2022: the Woofstock Alpha Dog. Working with Jenny Campbell, Rescue Village began turning the winning dog from a Tails at Twilight Gala auction into a cartoon and giving that dog a place of honor in the Woofstock logo.

Another change that year was less visible to visitors but fundamental to the event. Woofstock became an all-staff event. Previously, Rescue Village employees could volunteer to work Woofstock but were not expected to participate. Beginning in 2022, every employee became part of making the day happen. It gave staff ownership of the event, while also giving those who spend their days caring for animals inside the shelter a chance to step away from their usual routines, enjoy the community they help create and experience their work in a completely different way. Woofstock became a day not just to work for the mission, but to celebrate it together.

In 2023, the operating model expanded again. Ishee and the External Affairs team developed and supported a larger volunteer Event Team, with members taking responsibility for different parts of the festival and working alongside Rescue Village staff for months before Woofstock. Today, the Event Team includes more than 25 volunteers, while more than 250 volunteers are needed on event day.

The evolution has continued by connecting individual pieces of Woofstock to the Rescue Village departments that know those areas best. Admissions had long been one of the hardest parts of operating a festival with thousands of people arriving in a relatively short period of time. In 2025, Finance Director Kristy Bailey formally took responsibility for admissions as part of the work of the business office. Bailey and her team began turning a difficult event-day operation into a year-to-year system that could be studied, improved and carried forward.

In 2026, Shelter Services Director, Andrea Giorgio, and her department took responsibility for inviting and hosting Rescue Village’s transfer partners at Rescue Rrrow. Shelter Services works with those shelters and rescue organizations throughout the year, and at Woofstock the department can welcome those partners into a community event built around relationships that help animals all year long.

Increasingly, the people who know each part of Rescue Village’s work best are responsible for bringing that part of the organization to Woofstock.

At the same time, the audience has grown dramatically. More than 3,500 people attended in 2021. By 2024, attendance had reached nearly 10,000, and approximately 10,000 people came again in 2025.

The growth has meant more people on the field, more volunteers, more community partners, more sponsors and more money raised to support Rescue Village’s lifesaving work.

Woofstock belongs to more people now than it ever has.

The Ramble Revival

If you want to understand Woofstock, start with the Ramble.

Long before there was a beer garden, lure courses, food trucks or a stage full of music, there was a walk for animals. That walk eventually became known as the Ramble and remained at the heart of the event for years. At Punderson State Park, Ramblers once walked three miles along the park’s trails.

When Woofstock moved to the Cleveland Metroparks Polo Field in 2017, the Ramble paused. Rescue Village brought it back in 2022, reimagined for the festival Woofstock had become.

Today’s Ramble is mercifully not three miles. Although it ceremonially kicks off Woofstock, the festival is already in full swing when the Ramble happens: vendors are open, dogs and people are moving across the field, activities are underway and music is playing.

Then the Ramblers gather.

People who have spent weeks raising money for Rescue Village come together with their dogs and make a ceremonial march around the festival grounds. The Woofstock Alpha Dog and owner join the top fundraisers as Leaders of the Pack.

It is part fundraiser, part parade and part recognition of the people who have put their own time, energy and networks behind Rescue Village’s animals.

The Ramble’s role is more ceremonial now, but it reminds a festival of nearly 10,000 people how the whole thing began. For a few minutes, amid an event that has grown enormously since 1993, the Ramblers are once again doing the simplest thing the event has ever asked people to do: walking together for animals.

The T-Shirt and the Art of Woofstock

The T-shirt tradition goes all the way back to the first event in 1993. So does the illustration. Once a year, Rescue Village effectively gets into the T-shirt business, and it sells a lot of them.

Part fundraiser, part souvenir and part badge of participation, the shirt has become one of the longest continuous traditions connected to the event. The artwork changed from year to year long before Jenny Campbell became involved, and Campbell eventually became its most enduring interpreter.

Rescue Village began working with Campbell during the pre-Woofstock years and continued returning to her work year after year. Over more than two decades, she has created cartoons for fundraising appeals, communications, special projects and the event itself. Rescue Village eventually named her its Cartoonist in Residence. The title may be honorary, but the work behind it is very real.

For Woofstock, Campbell creates the annual festival artwork that appears on the T-shirt and helps give each year its own personality.

For the 30th festival in 2023, she reached back into years of Rescue Village cartoon history and gathered familiar dogs from older cartoons into a giant peace sign. When dock diving arrived the following year, the artwork became Super Pittie, with a dog flying through the air like Superman. In 2025, dogs apparently decided waiting for their humans was inefficient and drove themselves to Woofstock.

For 2026, the dogs have finally parked, and are spread across a blanket on the grass, Woodstock-style, with one flashing the peace sign.

Someone with decades of Rescue Village event shirts does not simply have old merchandise in a closet. They have a wearable history of the event.

The Alpha Dog

The Alpha Dog is a newer tradition layered onto Woofstock’s much older visual history.

Beginning in 2022, the winning bidder at Rescue Village’s Tails at Twilight Gala has had their dog transformed into a cartoon by Jenny Campbell and incorporated into the Woofstock logo. The annual festival artwork remains a separate, older tradition; the Alpha Dog instead receives a ceremonial place of honor in the logo itself, positioned above the other dogs.

Cole, a Rescue Village alumnus adopted by the Palermo family in 2019, became the first Alpha Dog in 2022. Coco, owned by Mary Margaret and Sean Dorsey, followed in 2023. In 2024, Sally, owned by Barbara and Evan Corns, became Alpha Dog. Robert and Linda Glickman’s dog, Fynn, took the honor in 2025.

In 2026, the Alpha Dog is Norman, owned by longtime Rescue Village board member and treasurer Brian Greene. Greene became involved with Rescue Village as a young man in the 1990s and has served on its Board of Directors for decades. Norman’s place in one of Woofstock’s newest traditions creates a fitting connection to a relationship with Rescue Village that reaches almost as far back as the event itself.

The Alpha Dog and owner join the top Ramble fundraisers as Leaders of the Pack and take part in other Woofstock traditions, including the costume contest. A winning bid at one Rescue Village fundraiser becomes part of the identity of another, while the dogs themselves become part of Woofstock’s accumulating history.

Cole. Coco. Sally. Fynn. Norman.

A new lineage is forming inside a much older one.

The Blessing of the Animals

The Blessing of the Animals reaches well back into the pre-Woofstock festival. It appears on the schedule of the Ramble & Four-Footed Festival by the event’s 10th year and remained after the Woofstock name arrived.

Today, amid music, contests, food and thousands of dogs, the blessing creates a quieter moment. For more than 15 years, Venerable Shih Yingfa has participated in Woofstock and led the Blessing of the Animals. The founder and abbot of Cleveland’s CloudWater Zendo has gathered year after year with attendees and their animals for a blessing centered on compassion and the relationship between people and animals.

Names change. Locations change. The blessing remains.

The Costume Contest

The costume contest reaches back into the earlier years of Woofstock and has become one of the day’s crowd favorites. Dogs and their people arrive as superheroes, food, fictional characters and things that are sometimes difficult to classify at all.

Local personalities have served as judges, and today the Woofstock Alpha Dog receives a front-row seat as one of them. Like many Woofstock traditions, it works because people are willing to take something completely ridiculous surprisingly seriously.

Partnerships and Sponsorship

Some Woofstock partnerships have grown right alongside the festival.

SwiftPaws is a particularly good example. The relationship began before Woofstock had reached its current size and before SwiftPaws appeared on Shark Tank. In those early years, SwiftPaws donated the use of its home lure-course systems so dogs at Woofstock could run. The systems were designed for home use; Woofstock ran them nearly continuously, for thousands of dogs, in a single day.

Eventually, the scale of the festival outgrew the equipment. Both organizations were growing, and the relationship became a formal sponsorship. SwiftPaws began sending its own staff with professional-grade equipment built for lure coursing at that scale.

SwiftPaws staff got a close look at what modern Woofstock had become. Because its team works at dog festivals around the country, its perspective carried particular weight. They told Rescue Village that Woofstock had become one of the larger dog festivals they encounter nationally, not simply a large event for Northeast Ohio.

There was something especially satisfying about hearing that from a partner that had known Woofstock before either organization had reached its current scale. They had grown up together.

What began with SwiftPaws lending home equipment to a growing local fundraiser became a professional partnership between two organizations operating at a very different scale. The lure courses remain among Woofstock’s most popular attraction, and the relationship behind them has become part of the festival’s history, too.

Sponsorship more broadly has become increasingly important to modern Woofstock. In 2022, AQUA DOC Lake & Pond Management became Presenting Sponsor at what was then the highest sponsorship level in Woofstock history. In 2024, Solon Manufacturing Co. stepped into that role and increased the sponsorship level again. By that year, more than 25 sponsors were contributing more than $100,000 to Woofstock.

The businesses involved come from very different industries. Some work directly with animals; others do not. Their contributions take different forms as well: financial support, equipment, expertise, activities and experiences that become part of Woofstock itself.

That is part of how the festival has grown: not simply by attracting more people, but by developing relationships with businesses and organizations that find their own ways to become part of the day.

What connects them on Woofstock day is Rescue Village and the animals the festival exists to help.

It Takes a Village

Woofstock happens in one day. Building it takes months.

The Rescue Village External Affairs department begins preparing long before the first dog reaches the Polo Field. Vendors have to be coordinated, sponsors recruited, volunteers organized, activities planned, marketing created, traffic managed, tents placed, food arranged and attractions scheduled.

The Woofstock Event Team includes more than 25 volunteers working alongside Rescue Village staff before the festival. On Woofstock day, more than 250 volunteers are needed. Individual volunteers, community organizations and school groups help with setup and breakdown, gates, admissions, merchandise, traffic, activities and dozens of other jobs. For Rescue Village staff, it is all hands on deck.

Then come nearly 10,000 attendees, scores of vendors, sponsors, contractors, rescue organizations and thousands of dogs.

For one day, the Polo Field becomes an enormous temporary community.

And when that community leaves, Woofstock still is not quite over.

The Festival After the Festival

By Sunday evening, Woofstock begins happening again online.

People share photographs of dogs in costumes, Ramble pictures, lure-course videos, family photographs, favorite vendors, friends they unexpectedly ran into and dogs asleep in the car after an exhausting day. Rescue Village shares its own images, but much of the energy comes from people telling their own version of Woofstock.

For the next several days, the festival is replayed across social media. Friends tag one another. Volunteers show the day from their part of the field. Vendors post pictures. Families trade videos. People discover things they missed while they were there.

Someone who never attended can nevertheless spend several days watching Woofstock happen through the people who did.

That afterlife matters. It extends a one-day festival into a shared community memory. The people who attend do not merely experience Woofstock; they continue making it after they leave.

Recognition

As Woofstock grew, the wider community noticed.

Cleveland Magazine named Woofstock the Best Charitable Event of the East in 2023, 2024, 2025 and 2026.

The recognition is gratifying, but the more important measure may be what has happened on the field itself: a festival that drew a little more than 3,500 people in 2021 now welcomes about 10,000 and has sustained that audience. More people are participating, more people are volunteering, more organizations are involved, and more money is being raised to care for animals.

Why Woofstock Matters

Of course, Woofstock is fun. It is a day to bring your dog, see friends, listen to music, eat something good, shop, watch dogs compete and perhaps leave with a T-shirt you did not know you needed. The name itself invites a certain amount of foolishness.

Peace signs are encouraged. Dogs may dress as superheroes. Cartoon dogs may drive without licenses. Rescue Village can even have an honorary Cartoonist in Residence whose serious artistic contribution to the institution frequently involves making people laugh.

But the fun has always served a serious purpose.

Animals arrive at Rescue Village every day needing somewhere safe to stay. Some need medical treatment. Some need behavioral support. Some need more time before they are ready for adoption. Others have come from difficult circumstances and need people willing to be patient with them.

That work costs money. Woofstock helps provide it.

The combination has been there almost from the beginning: have a good day with your dog and use that day to help animals who need one. That is what the first walk did in 1993 when it raised money toward a larger shelter. It is what the Ramble & Four-Footed Festival was doing when people walked Punderson’s trails, listened to music, ate lunch and entered canine games. And it is what roughly 10,000 people are still doing at Woofstock today.

There is an important distinction hiding in that history.

The name Woofstock dates to 2006. In 2026, it became 20 years old. The event behind the name reaches all the way back to 1993.

Thirty-three full festivals have taken place over those years, with 2020 standing apart as the COVID-era observance that preserved the tradition when the festival itself could not be held.

That is why the history before 2006 matters.

From 1993 to Today

In 1993, a group of animal lovers gathered at Chagrin Falls High School for Put Your Best Paw Forward. They walked for animals, sold illustrated T-shirts and raised $35,000 toward a larger shelter.

In 2026, Rescue Village will hold its 33rd festival at the Cleveland Metroparks Polo Field. The event has had different names and different homes. It has grown from a walk into a festival large enough to fill a field. Its oldest tradition paused for a while and returned. Its annual artwork became an archive. New traditions took their place beside old ones. Its operating structure evolved, and its audience grew.

Pieces of that history survived because people cared enough to keep them.

But the basic idea has changed remarkably little.

Bring people together.

Have a good time.

And do something good for animals.

After more than three decades, Rescue Village is still putting its best paw forward.